thank you all muchly for the help. I did get a fix by setting $ENV{PATH} = '' which is fine for now.

I use other parts of ENV quite a lot though, esp REMOTE_USER as I am using htaccess and need to identify people. I realise it os not the most secure method, but it's fine for what I want.

To be honest, I don't completely understand ENv and PATH and what they really do - I need to do some Apache reading I guess.

Thanks again for the help