Sorry, the earlier info I gave seems to be a red herring, the program's error routine is faulty...
The actual line of code that is crashing is :-
my $s = shift @_; my $t = translate($s);
What is it trying to do here ? I'm not aware of any 'translate' command, but then I'm on a very steep learning curve here ! @_ contains the value 'Austria'.
thanks for reading this far !
OK, mystery explained (sort of) : the version of Locale::gettext that I compiled from CPAN for some strange reason loops in &$AUTOLOAD. Overwriting it with version from pre-installed Mandrake 5.8.3 distro fixes problem. Go figure.