Good guess. I applied the line you recommended, and now the system does not fail on compile. It also does not ever return. And even though I have it in eval mode, It doesn't spit out any clue what's happening behind the curtain. Is there any bright way trace what's happening in perl.exe?

If I comment out my($q = CGI::Fast->new), then everything runs perfectly. And at present my test script does nothing with $q, so my problem is in the instantiation. From the shell it runs smoothly, too.

Thanks, tye.