Yes, your correction works perfectly ... the difference seems to be this line ...

$agent->agent('Firefox/1.5');

this seems to be required for some sites but not others ... and I missed it somehow when I was looking at docs ...

as for my potentially heinious intentions (LOL) - I'm a foreign language instructor in Korea - I use a copy of Boutell's PerlMud 3.0 with a POE skeleton running a bunch of mud bots as part of my cirr. ... a very minor part of the bots that I'm working on is the ability to define words, offer spelling suggestions, syn and antonyms - that kind of thing ...

the students aren't allowed to surf so unless the bots provide it they're SOL ... I stumbled on my problem when I switched online dictionaries - found one with more understandable definitions for foreign language students ... and better xml for parsing ...

Thanks