Thanks so much for your quick response. This is good practice so I appreciate the recommendation. In this application I have had no cause to open any files directly, although I believe Authen::Captcha probably opens some and I use this to generate a session key when a user signs in. Some of the other modules I use may open files as well. Here is the only case I use an OPEN command:

open ( MAIL, "|$sendmail -oi -t" ) or die "Cannot open $sendmail: $!";
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But this mail module has not been involved with any of the errors that have emerged. Is there a way to run lsof from inside my PERL script? If not, I can suggest it to my hosting service. Thanks, Tony