Gotcha! A Perl-driven web site had a strange bug. It was always missing the first element in one of its drop-down forms The form was populated dynamically by code. The code looked okay: my @layouts = map { $_, $pub->{$_}->{'name'} } sort { $pub->{$a}->{'name'} cmp $pub->{$b}->{'name'} } grep { /^\d+$/ && $pub->{$_}->{'type'} eq "layout" && LJ::S2::can_use_layer($u, $pub->{$_}->{'uniq'}) } keys %$pub;