1. Perl is part of our engineering development environment. Since we're a month away from final release of our product, we're under an environment freeze, so an upgrade to perl is considered extremely disruptive
2. We'd been using the exact same version of perl, with the exact same code, for over a year with no issues, so I'm more interested in what may be causing this

Thanks again

From point 2 I infer that the problem has started recently. If so, what else has changed in your environment? Windows updates perhaps? Other applications or drivers installed? New hard drives or other hardware?

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DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

We initially thought it correlated to some Windows security patching. We had the I.T. department re-image the machines back to where they were several months ago, and the problem persists.

Other than that nothing changed on the machines that we're aware of

Network switches were upgraded around the time I saw a dramatic increase in the frequency of this problem

Other than that, nothing that we know of