I said I was ambivalent about CGI due to the nature of the script, and I know why after trying to rewrite it-- there's no lovely solution when loops are involved. I've banged my head up against it because I apparently enjoy the pain. So here's how I solved it with sub refs. (I left the HTML in 3.2 because I got lazy after all this).

use CGI qw(:standard -nodebug); 

... same code through open () ...

my $table_cell = sub {
    print "table_cell called\n";
    (@linkName)
         ? return td( {-align => "left"}, 
               a( {-href => pop( @linkURL ) }, pop( @linkName ) )
           )
         : return td();
};

my $table_rows = sub { 
    print "table_rows called\n";
    my $rows;
    foreach (@linkName) {
        $rows .= Tr( &$table_cell, &$table_cell );
    }
    return $rows;
};

print FILE (
    start_html( -title => "Favorite Links",
                -bgcolor => "#000000",
                -link => "$lcolor",
                -alink => "$lcolor",
                -vlink => "$lcolor"),
    table( { -align => "center" }, &$table_rows ),
    end_html()
) or die "write error: $!\n";

... and close ...
[download]

For the record (on Win95), your original code died on a filename with the (r) mark in it. And this was after I had commented out the System Error line (line 12) because it kept tripping there-- would you explain what that line does for us less advanced types? Once those two issues were sidestepped, it worked, rendering the very handy page.