Greetings brethren. It's been too long since I've been enveloped in the warmth of perl on a daily basis, as I've been doing too much Project Management, and not enough coding.

But I now find myself facing an unsavory problem. We have an application which may have multiple unrelated instances running on a machine. On Windows, these applications sometimes (.001% of the time) will die with:

Can't load 'c:/xgsPerl/5.8.5/lib/auto/File/Glob/Glob.dll' for module F
+ile::Glob: load_file:%1 is not a valid Win32 application at c:/xgsPer
+l/5.8.5/lib/XSLoader.pm line 68.
[download]

(this is perl 5.8.5)

This problem never happens with only one instance of the tool running, leading us to suspect concurrency issues (duh)

Assume for a minute we are in a frozen development environment, and updating the version of perl or File::Glob is not an option.

A couple of questions

• Does anyone have a good explanation for what we are seeing?
• Any suggestions for working around it? (my current idea is to eval{} the glob() calls)
• Does anyone have a pure perl glob() implementation we could drop in and try?

Thanks,
~Jeff