This is classic example of why one should use warnings;. Had the Original Poster used warnings, rather than failing silently Perl would have complained when the OP's script tried to concatenate an undefined value with "\n". This would have been a very good indication that the datastructure returned by XMLin() wasn't what he was expecting.

The moral; use the tools that Perl offers; use strict;, use warnings;, and in the case of deciphering the datastructures returned by XML::Simple, be sure to use Data::Dumper;. Data::Dumper is the cheap and easy way to inspect a datastructure.