Thanks, for the Autoflush infomration, I tried that this morning and it had no impact on the program. Continued to misbehave. I was able to run a few more test and determine it was in the "psexec" program that I was using for the remote connection. It was coming into the system in a way not compatable with AS Perl. If you know the oddities of windows and the almost STDIN and STDOUT it offers, then you have a good idea why it didn't work. Anyway, moved on to plan B. I'm running the interactive scripts on a citrix server. :) a little over kill, but why not.