Sorry, I did add some die statments. When those die statements are in the registrant_needs() routine, but outside the dispatch conditional, they are printed to the browser with a little help from Carp. When I move them inside the blocks of the conditions, either it works in the else clause, or it doesn't work in the if clause. Without the die; the if clause merely returns control to form2, instead of passing it on to form4. With it, the browser hangs w/o rendering the message fed to die();. Also, I'm not seeing my debug messages in the log. Its all very perplexing.