You don't say what version of perl you're using. My first attempt to use XML::Twig was with perl 5.6, and it died a horrible death ... simply upgrading perl to 5.8.1 was sufficient to handle the reading/writing of XML that I was doing with no other changes (same level of XML::Twig, my code unchanged). If you're not using 5.8 for XML handling, I highly suggest it.