Thanks for the suggestions, I will try that, I managed to duplicate the error an ubuntu machine I develop on so can test out your suggestion. I never posted code as there are no errors showing so I have no idea what if any of my code is at fault - the error also only started happening since upgrading to Apache2/mod_perl2. I rewrote the mod_perl portions of code to be cgi and removed mod_perl2 and all works well. I will post a followup here when I get to the bottom of it.