Thanks everyone for your comments.. I wasn't aware anyone had replied - I thought I had my account configured to notify me and hadn't got any notification.. I'll have to look into that.

The NoAttr thing might be the simplest solution, although I also like the idea of building a twig, because I think XML::Twig is more likely to produce exactly what I need than XML::Simple will be.

SOAP::Lite... well.. it might be lite, but it seems so complicated.. I'm not familiar with SOAP at all, and the docs for S:L look like they assume you already know everything about it. Maybe I'll change my code over to that at the next revision..for the moment, I've got a very limited amount of time to get this thing working, so I have to make compromises in terms of elegance in design versus having something work.