actually, the smaller, run-via-cron script does use DBI ...

i don't know whic versions without trying to check each one individually, and even then, i couldn't tell you if the previous person built them from RPM or from source ...

i found another possible reason for the crashing -- trying to resize a non-existent image. the person who wrote one component fetched the images from a remote site via  system( "wget" ... blah blah ) which doesn't really have much status to check.

i added an existence check on the attempted image, and that seemed to make the bug go away. just got *more* defensive.