Perl isn't half as picky as COBOL, and it will actually give the occasional clue as to what went wrong.
Thanks for the assist, I'm sort of blundering about in the dark as yet, since I didn't even know there were EQ emulators two weeks ago.
I will probably have to make a whole set of new accounts in order to multibox anyway, so I may as well get started now and make one a dedicated GM account.