well, i'm running ActiveState's Perl 5.6.0, which fakes fork(), by creating a new thread. the IPC modules are bundled with the distribution, so i *assume* they are blessed by the vendor. i've put in a call to them, but it's never enough to look in one place.... thanks for the response.

i suppose i could ask more generally, what would cause IO::Pipe to complain about unavailable resources?

oh, BTW, WinNT is my client's OS.

~Particle