i did this... telnet'ed to port 80 and grep'ed the returned html by eye... the cookies were there...

i finally nailed the problem down to the browser -- for some odd reason netscape didn't like the domain *and/or* the path arguments, since removing the domain argument made everything work out just swell.

thanks to fpi for his/her suggestion --
trimming back the arguments to the CGI::cookie method to just the -name and -value parameters when troubleshooting is the way to go.
(bolded to indicate importance for the skimmers amongst us ;-) )

d_i_r_t_y