Thank you very much for this info.

I used to use SuSE and it kept far more up-to-date than Debian stable does but then I could go to the bleeding edge and live with unstable/testing if I wanted to.

The original plan was to keep the perls on the two machines in step but this has failed somehow. FWIW the @INC on my local machine is at @INC is /etc/perl /usr/local/lib/perl/5.8.8 /usr/local/share/perl/5.8.8 /usr/lib/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/perl/5.8 /usr/share/perl/5.8 /usr/local/lib/site_perl . Anything in the /usr/local dirs supersedes that in the /usr/share or /usr/lib.

I found entries in /usr/local/share/perl/5.8.8 including CGI v3.35 on the remote machine so at some point in the past I had attempted to upgrade the remote to match the local on CGI. I have been brutal with the remote machine and did an apt-get remove perl. Luckily the machine held up to that treatment but this action removed a lot of stuff including mysql, spamassassin and ntp. It was interesting for me at least, to note what was left in /usr/share/perl* and /usr/lib/perl* after that treatment. e.g.

l /usr/lib/perl/5.8.8/
total 108
drwxr-xr-x 10 root root  4096 2008-07-22 11:09 auto
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-07-22 11:09 B
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  7288 2008-04-25 21:45 B.pm
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  2570 2008-04-25 21:45 Config.pm
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 13691 2008-04-25 21:45 Cwd.pm
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  8884 2008-04-25 21:45 DynaLoader.pm
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  5967 2008-04-25 21:45 Errno.pm
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  3458 2008-04-25 21:45 Fcntl.pm
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-05-04 13:58 File
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root  4096 2008-07-22 11:09 IO
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   413 2008-04-25 21:45 IO.pm
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  3111 2008-04-25 21:45 lib.pm
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-05-04 13:58 List
-rw-------  1 root root  6416 2008-04-05 19:22 perllocal.pod
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  1435 2008-04-25 21:45 POSIX.pm
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  1340 2008-04-25 21:45 re.pm
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-05-04 13:58 Scalar
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  3514 2008-04-25 21:45 Socket.pm
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  3408 2008-04-25 21:45 XSLoader.pm
[download]

I then removed everything in /usr/local/share/perl/5.8.8 and reinstalled perl and the modules I needed to get hopefully somewhere back to a straight playing field. I think that puts the remote back in a standard platform state.

Doing the same on the local machine will scrub out KDE and X server so I will try checking what belongs in /usr/local/share/perl as you suggest first and see what I can fix that way.

Thank you for your help.