I've just found this thread very useful so even though it is probably no help to the original poster I'll add another comment. The reason the suggested workaround works is pretty obvious with a glance at CGI.pm (line 1802 in my version 3.15):

#### Method: start_form
# synonym for startform
'start_form' => <<'END_OF_FUNC',
sub start_form {
    $XHTML ? &start_multipart_form : &startform;
}
END_OF_FUNC
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So if not a bug this is at least a big shortcoming in the CGI.pm documentation, which claims that startform is a simple alias for start_form.

And for all the numbnuts above who said "why not just use multipart every time". What??? Multipart encoding only works with POST. If Firefox sees:

<method='get' enctype='multipart/form-data' />
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Then it ignores the encoding with a warning, and probably does what you want, but Konqueror will honour the encoding and ignore the method. Hence all your forms get POSTed. Hence if I have a simple search box on my site Konqeror users can't can't bookmark the results page, and if I hit reload I get a spurious warning about resubmitting form data. Vanilla GET/url-encoded forms are in the HTML spec for a reason and seeing comments along the lines of "I don't need them so you shouldn't either" makes me wonder what this community is coming to.

OK, sorry, rant over. :-)

TIM
--
#Tip: use 'no strict' to make those nasty errors vanish.