I haven't tried upgrading. I can try that, but I have a couple of issues with that:

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

That being said, I have a test network I can install a version of 5.8.8 on.

Thanks again