I"ve never used PAR, but I'm not surprised to find that it doesn't bundle perldiag.pod for you...(until someone fixes it to do so, that is). I am surprised to hear you say "no improvement" came from removing the "use diagnostics;"...are you using modules that also use diagnostics? Try getting rid of it everywhere, and say what error message you get then if it still doesn't work. (You should probably not just remove the "use diagnostics;", but instead replace it with "use warnings;", since I think it does that for you.)