Status Update 4: I have filed a ticket for Strawberry Perl based on the failing results of depends.exe however these same fails are present in a machine that passes this test so I'm now not sure that this is the root cause of my originally posted problem. I suspect that the issue lies in core perl itself at this point. I remain stuck on how to boil this issue down small enough to submit a case that will resolve the problem.

Update: to clarify the failure appears to be the way core perl does garbage collection on libxml2 objects. (murkier) I was unable to find obvious open bugs in libxml2 or perl on this issue.