Well, I am not allowed to telnet into my server without supplying the hosting company with my bank details (!), so I called tech support and started with that.

It didn't turn out to be the problem, however - after hours of brainstorming with techs, the problem has been solved. When admins and tech support people keep coming back to you saying that it's X or Y and not their problem, and you know it's not X *or* Y, just keep brainstorming until an answer is found :-) (It was broken for ~ 2 weeks)

As it turned out (and I'm paraphrasing the admin, so my tech-speak(TM) may not be 100% accurate), the problem was that the host could not properly use IO::Socket with the scripts.

It appears the libm series libraries were not compatible with my server's version of the /etc/protocols file. They updated the file and added the correct libraries and the script now seems to be functioning properly.

Whee! :-) Hope anyone else with this problem discovers this thread :-) Thanks splash and DocJohn for the help :-) And DocJohn -- thanks for the script! :-)