Thanks for trying, but the situation remains unchanged even with the Options set to +ExecGCI -Multiviews.
I'm sure this is not a perl problem. What's weird is that all I'm doing is fetching a page from another server, yet apache's security gets in the way of that.
I saw that apache does not allow much to happen in cgi-bin for security reasons. I had to write my script data out to /var/www/html/DATA. Is it that apache is set up to regect any input that is not "trusted"?