nerd help needed: non-geeks feel free to skip

So, I need a bit of programming help with some Perl/CGI, if any of my friends out there happen to have any expertise in that area. For some reason I can't figure out, when I send cookies to the browser it is displaying the text of the cookie on the resulting HTML page. I'm sending the cookie before I write anything whatsoever to the browser, which I would have thought would do the trick.

Any ideas?