I'm no perl guru, but I suspect that your ISP has perl running in taint mode automatically (check to ensure that the first line of your doesn't have perl -T on it).

I'm not exactly certain what the solution is, but you might try putting the word "my" in front of when the variable is first defined in podvars.pm, such as:

my $pod_usequery = 1;

I have no idea if this will change anything, but it's worth a shot.

John