Further investigation reveals that running the script from the command-line (passing the CGI params) runs without problems. The assignment is made without fail.

So now the situation becomes even more bizarre. It would seem that the failure to assign directly from the hash is because of security levels. That didn't seem to make any sense, because an assignment could still be made from a scalar, so what's the problem?

On a hunch, I removed the -T from the Perl configuration in IIS, and tried the script again. This time it ran without any errors.

I don't know much about Taint mode, but it seems to have been the reason for the assignment failures even though the error message said absolutely nothing about any tainted variables. "Undefined value as a HASH reference" doesn't seem even remotely close to tainted variables to me.

Does any of this make sense to anyone? If so, could you fill me in?

ryddler