One more thing, unrelated to Perl, but pertinent to those of us using this application - I've been having these issues with the app running on x86 RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 AS (RHEL4 AS). Before this upgrade we were running a much older version on Solaris (SPARC) with relatively few problems, at least not *nearly* as bad as we're experiencing now.

Last week I teased out of their engineers that their Linux development is being done on RHEL 3. G-d knows why, but it is what it is. Linux support was only added a few years ago.

However, this app has been running on Win32 since it's inception so I tested everything on a Windows 2003 server and have experienced NO problems whatsoever. No more memory leaks, no more crashes, no more inexplicable refusals to communicate with nodes.

Now I just have to port a pile of in-house management and integration scripts from *nix to Win32 *grumble*