Thank you very much tlm, that is the answer I needed.

As you can see from my original post, I had already figured out that using "keys" seemed to reset the iterator of %cluster_info, but I didn't know why it was off in the first place. Your pointer to the recent meditation and another look at "perldoc -f each" cleared things up for me.

Thanks to everyone who responded for their help. This is my first time on this site and I am so grateful for the help finding a resolution before getting back to the office tomorrow morning. I think now I'd better review a lot of other code I've written for the same problem.

-Matthew