Thank you very much for your insights. It should have been so obvious to me that my program crashed and gave the line in the script of where it crashed as part of the error message rather than mech actually trying to follow something on my hard drive. Guess I'm just tired and old. It still bugs me though that something like
$m->follow_link( url_regex => qr/contact/i)){
completely ignores the "url_regex => qr/contact/i" part and follows EVERY link instead of just the ones that may have the word "contact" in them. I have read and continue to read WWW::Mechanize all the time, but nothing there explains why this is so and what the purpose of the regex part is, if follow_link is going to ignore that part anyway.