Joost,

Regarding your reply and suggestions here...

...I installed livehttpheaders in firefox and checked the headers for both my test perl script and my HTM file using the exact same source code as the perl script:

Perl Header (for the script that doesn't correctly diplay styles)

http://127.0.0.1:81/perl/secure/test.pl

GET /perl/secure/test.pl HTTP/1.1
Host: 127.0.0.1:81
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4
+) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9
+,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
----------------------------------------------------------
http://127.0.0.1:81/perl/secure/training_site.css

GET /perl/secure/training_site.css HTTP/1.1
Host: 127.0.0.1:81
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4
+) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4
Accept: text/css,*/*;q=0.1
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://127.0.0.1:81/perl/secure/test.pl
Cache-Control: max-age=0

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
----------------------------------------------------------
[download]

HTM Header (For the HTM that correctly displays styles)

http://127.0.0.1:81/perl/secure/test.htm

GET /perl/secure/test.htm HTTP/1.1
Host: 127.0.0.1:81
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4
+) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9
+,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Server: OptiPerl/Commercial
Content-Type: text/html
Connection: close
--------------: ---
----------------------------------------------------------
http://127.0.0.1:81/perl/secure/training_site.css

GET /perl/secure/training_site.css HTTP/1.1
Host: 127.0.0.1:81
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4
+) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4
Accept: text/css,*/*;q=0.1
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://127.0.0.1:81/perl/secure/test.htm

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Server: OptiPerl/Commercial
Content-Type: text/css
Connection: close
Content-Length: 1950
----------------------------------------------------------
[download]

I've tried both IE and Firefox with indentical results.

I compared the two headers using "Beyond Compare 2" and found that this portion exists in the header for the HTM file that displays correctly, but are missing from the actual perl script file's header:

Server: OptiPerl/Commercial
Content-Type: text/css
Connection: close
Content-Length: 1950
[download]

I guess with these items missing the css file doesn't get called correctly. The question is how do I fix this? Is this a server configuration thing? Thanks for all the help, everyone. I'm seeking further enlightenment.