OK, thanks old friend, your question prompted me to look at what calls what and here's the deal: XML::Feed calls LWP::UserAgent which, in the case of https searches, calls IO::Socket::SSL which calls IO::Socket::INET6 unless it's told not to or it can't find IO::Socket::INET6 in which case it uses IO::Socket:INET which is what I apparently want. So I need to figure out how I can tell it that from up before I call XML::Feed. So I tried removing IO::Socket::INET6 from @INC in a BEGIN block, but I still get the errors ... will report back as I find out more.