in reply to Confused about Taint

Hmm just a thought: Does your webserver run mod_perl, and could this be causing that? Or maybe the server is set up to use some kind of wrapper to exec user cgis, and that calls perl? I couldn't think of why... but it might be the path to track down the error: look how perl is executed by your webserver.
-- bash$ :(){ :|:&};: