Thanks! Once I commented out the validate call, it works

I guess if the validate function doesn't like the xml files then it just dies?

That's correct. I'm guessing either you cannot actually retrieve the dtd or you're getting some invalid cached copy of the dtd. If you really want to validate, you can load it from a file (rather then let libxml retrieve it via a network call) and then pass the string to the Dtd constructor:

  local $/ = undef;
  open my $fh, "<", $file || die "cannot open $file - $!\n";
  my $str = <$fh>;
  close $fh;
  
  my $dtd = XML::LibXML::Dtd->parse_string( $str );
[download]

-derby