This seems to work for me. You mentioned wrapping a root element around it, but did you include the <?xml ...?> bit? Even when I remove that, though, it still works. Does it fail with your sample file?

#!/usr/bin/perl

use XML::Simple;

my $xml = do { local $/; <DATA> };

my $hash = XMLin( $xml );

use Data::Dumper; print Dumper( $hash );


__END__
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
<CVS>
$Id: File_Find.pl,v 1.1 2006-12-17 19:25:03 eric Exp $
</CVS>
<DATE>2006-12-10</DATE>
<INTRODUCTION>Blah</INTRODUCTION>
<TITLE>Foo</TITLE>
<AUTHOR>Bar</AUTHOR>
<ARTICLE>
foo bar baz
</ARTICLE>
</root>
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It looks like the hash does what it should:

]$ perl test
$VAR1 = {
          'INTRODUCTION' => 'Blah',
          'CVS' => '
$Id: File_Find.pl,v 1.1 2006-12-17 19:25:03 eric Exp $
',
          'ARTICLE' => '
foo bar baz
',
          'TITLE' => 'Foo',
          'AUTHOR' => 'Bar',
          'DATE' => '2006-12-10'
        };
[download]

Update: If I move the data out to a file and use XMLin( $ARGV[0], NoAttr => 1 ) it still works.