Its possible to accidentally inherit an AUTOLOAD method. Often this will happen if a class somewhere in the chain uses AutoLoader or defines one of their own. This can lead to confusing error messages when method lookups fail. Sometimes you want to avoid this accidental inheritance. In that case, inherit from Class::WhiteHole. All unhandled methods will produce normal Perl error messages. WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Class-WhiteHole/