Looks like my ppm is a bit messed up. I ran a query on text::Reform as soon as I encountered the problem and it reported back that I had version 1.11. After your post I Looked at the source I saw that I had version 1.10 instead. I have since pulled it off of CPAN, undid the modifications to text::Autoformat.pm, and all is good with the world.

thanks for the tip,
davidj