Thanks merlyn - I've spent the last few days re-writing code to cater for the various Apache::Registry gotcha's and managed to convince myself that this was another one.

But 5 minutes ago I realised it was just me being stupid - I had an empty hash, the code normally works because of the persistence that is provided but it wasn't explicity initialised in the section of the code dealing with these requests.

Sincere apologies

Jonathan
/me wanders off feeling more stupid than usual