Sorry for the unformatted mess in my first post. The update from etch to lenny contained to update from perl 5.8.8 to perl 5.10.0 so I actually did just two upgrades at once, not three.

Thanks for the answers. I had hoped that there might have been a change with perl 5.10 that caused this issue. I guess they just have improved the taint check so my formerly working but deficient code comes back to haunt me.

I added a check and debug output for @INC so I will now have to wait until the issue occurs again (it doesnt regularly).