tried the system. and no failure messages after 30 screens.
so it seems the problem was a quirk in ppm 2.1.6 which unfixed something that was fixed in apache-asp 2.57.
on the positive side of the problem, it did strongly encourage me to look at handlers with modperl. which happened to provide an approach to taking http trafffic at a central site and farming it in very specific ways to other servers.
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