Attempted to clarify the difference in a follow up to a question on it. If someone is trying to help, am not going to turn it away.

Am glad that you too are still "interested" in this question! Had not run DebugCGI. No unexpected diffs in the %ENV, but what looks like maybe a request handler appeared in the registry-ized object. Am not sure what, if anything, to make of it with regard to this problem. (Note that /perl-status also doesn't turn up anything obvious, either.)

/cgi-bin/ is as follows:

$VAR1 = bless( {
 ".parameters" => [],
 ".charset" => "ISO-8859-1",
 ".etab" => 1,
 ".elid" => 1,
 ".fieldnames" => {},
 ".header_printed" => 1,
 "escape" => 1
 }, 'CGI' );
[download]

$VAR1 = bless( {
 ".parameters" => [],
 ".charset" => "ISO-8859-1",
 ".r" => bless( do{\(my $o = 164475400)},
'Apache2::RequestRec' ),
 ".etab" => 1,
 ".elid" => 1,
 ".fieldnames" => {},
 ".header_printed" => 1,
 "escape" => 1
 }, 'CGI' );
[download]

Big question to me is where do I look - mod_include, ModPerl::Registry, or even CGI?

aha !
running the dump before, during and after a series of calls to the test script demonstrated that after the first call (and every other call) to the script, that there was one "count" parameter, and it always remained at 5:

$VAR1 = bless( {
 ".parameters" => [ "count" ],
 "count" => [ 5 ], 

 (... the rest was deleted...)
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but why???

Aha x2.

Using this changed the behavior to what I expected:

CGI::initialize_globals;

Info found at, where else:

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=11194

By googling cgi.pm param caching

Note that this seemed to clear the params from the object, as shown by the CGIDebug, but did not affect the "count" parameter.

Thanks for all the help, folks.