So you did not run my DebugCGI?

You had already mentioned that 1..30/ 1..5 difference

DebugCGI should dump CGI object, along with %ENV -- really important debugging aids that help you narrow down the problem

Attempted to clarify the difference in a follow up to a question on it. If someone is trying to help, am not going to turn it away.

Am glad that you too are still "interested" in this question! Had not run DebugCGI. No unexpected diffs in the %ENV, but what looks like maybe a request handler appeared in the registry-ized object. Am not sure what, if anything, to make of it with regard to this problem. (Note that /perl-status also doesn't turn up anything obvious, either.)

/cgi-bin/ is as follows:

$VAR1 = bless( {
 ".parameters" => [],
 ".charset" => "ISO-8859-1",
 ".etab" => 1,
 ".elid" => 1,
 ".fieldnames" => {},
 ".header_printed" => 1,
 "escape" => 1
 }, 'CGI' );
[download]

ModPerl is as follows:

$VAR1 = bless( {
 ".parameters" => [],
 ".charset" => "ISO-8859-1",
 ".r" => bless( do{\(my $o = 164475400)},
'Apache2::RequestRec' ),
 ".etab" => 1,
 ".elid" => 1,
 ".fieldnames" => {},
 ".header_printed" => 1,
 "escape" => 1
 }, 'CGI' );
[download]

Big question to me is where do I look - mod_include, ModPerl::Registry, or even CGI?

aha !
running the dump before, during and after a series of calls to the test script demonstrated that after the first call (and every other call) to the script, that there was one "count" parameter, and it always remained at 5:

$VAR1 = bless( {
 ".parameters" => [ "count" ],
 "count" => [ 5 ], 

 (... the rest was deleted...)
[download]

but why???