As usual, the Perl problem was the line feeds

Somehow, in being emailed to me, the USSv4a.pl and settings.txt files both acquired nasty Mac carriage returns instead of nice well-behaved Unix line feeds. This kind of problem has arisen often enough in the past that I knew to suspect it, but I had to figure out how Komodo deals with line feed issues before I could confirm that this was the problem and correct it.

Now the program runs fine, but it prints some reporting lines probably created by the undergrad while he was debugging the new bells and whistles....

...Three hours later.... I've found, understood and removed the unwanted reporting lines, and found and fixed a big mistake in how the program decided whether it was time to print out a report. And found and fixed several minor problems....