Thanks for the reply. All of you. I agree with your suggestions. Here is the catch. I'm using an old bunch of code, about 800-900 lines, that need to be updated to work in mod-perl. It uses globals extensively and in really careless ways. This code uses a common cgi parsing routine that parses the url agrs and dumps them into globals. I want to avoid a total rewrite.
I'm beginning to understand how mod-perl is handling things. It's different than I thought.