After reading your little blurb, I went back and looked at my configuration files for my editor. I configured three different Perl launch options. The primary one I've been using for testing/checking my scripts straight from the editor has -wT (it launches Perl from a command prompt). When I run the script via Apache, I've been leaving off -wT.

I think I did it this way because a problem I can't figure out is when I run the script from my editor, Perl balks at having #!perl -T. Perl claims declaring -T is too late. But that line works fine with Apache. I'd configure Apache to include -T automatically (if it was possible), but the production server doesn't have Perl configured that way. Oh well.