Thanks. The persistent environment is a good lead, but in this case I don't believe it applies. I'll snoop around the CGI.pm source and see if a better explanation turns up. For now I've been passing -tabindex => '' into each element which effectively eliminates side effects from the browser, but is a pain in the back end. If I were a suspicious man I might suspect that Mandriva has taken some artistic license with the default behaviour of their packaged version. Or maybe it's just something simple that I've missed...