well, after much hair pulling, it seems the issue is with the Oracle OCI interface and the DBI on Linux. It's one of those pesky hit and miss things, though. So there has been no way to nail it down so that it happens every time. But I've been doing a lot of reading and testing and that seems to be the only thing which can account for what was happening.

"sometimes when you make a request for the head you don't
want the big, fat body...don't you go snickering."
                                         -- Nathan Torkington UoP2K a.k.a gnat