i think you're right, maybe in more ways than one (i guess) in both instances (if I remember right) I was using WRAP='SOFT' for the textarea, the reason I switched back to it was because I wanted to only use user-specified line breaks, so that copying and pasting didn't look so ugly, but I was avoiding wrap=none but having the 's in there didn't help either....i completely missed that ;( well i'm mostly satisfied that one of the two things caused the problem, hopefully after enough reading on CGI.pm i'll have an improved product thanks very much for all the help, hopefully i can come back from this with a significant helping of acquired wisdom :)