Ok, this has got to be a perl version issue, but maybe it's obvious, 
and will come to me as soon as I press send.

I've got two servers, with identical applications and databases (I've 
mirrored them to make sure).

Production server --  Redhat 9, perl 5.8.0 -- works fine
Development server -- Fedora core 3, perl  5.8.5 -- worked on Fecora 
core 1, perl 5.8.3, but now doesn't.

Here's the matrix of test results.  Spidering is the system on which I 
run the spider.  Spidered is the system on which the application and 
database resides.

Spidering      Spidered   Status
=========      ========   ======

Production	Production   ok
Production	Production   ok
Development	Production   no good
Development	Development  no good

The swish-e related scripts and config files were copied from 
Production to development.  The only change was the base url, so the 
development server would get spidered.

I've narrowed the problem down to my test_url callback, meant to 
exclude a link:
/login.taf?_function=logout:

         test_url    => sub { $_[0]->path !~ /\logout?$/ }

The callback works on production, but not on dev. Debug shows the 
spider following the logout link, removing authentication cookies.  A 
few few more links are attempted, but fail because the spider is now 
presenting empty cookies.

I've tried several other patterns, without success:
         test_url    => sub { $_[0]->path !~ m/logout/ }

I've verified that there are no other test_url subroutines lurking.

swish-e version 2.4.3  (also tried unsuccessfully yesterday's current).

thx