I very much appreciate the time you took to lay this out for me. I am such a huge fan of open source software (veteran of Two Perl Conferences, planning my third!) that I am surprised I didn't see the entire picture. I was looking for the community to benefit me, not the other way around.

For that, to the community, I apologize.

I'll do my best to distill the problem down to a reproducible and distributable chunk. The program basically uses DBI to connect to an Oracle 7.3 database and a MS SQL 7 database and moves data between them. The queries it uses to move the data back and forth are stored in a table. So it reads this query table, stores its data in a hash, then does select and insert queries (the ones stored in the hash) on opposite databases to move the data. (Neato, eh?) The tricky part is that the data (and the queries) are proprietary to my customer, so I can't just post all that. I'll have to generalize it somehow.

At the present time, the problem has mysteriously vanished. I can't explain why or how, but while I was working with the software today, it was gone. I'm quite certain it will resurface, and when it does, I'll save that version of the software and try to pare it down.

Thanks again for your time and attention.

--Mark (prodigal open-sourcer)