Thread 1 terminated abnormally: lock can only be used on shared values at UTP.pm line 189
<c>

Do you think this is because of the separate package ??
I declare and initialise the hash in MdAgent.pl :

<c>
...
my %Totals :shared;
...
msg("initialising totals");
foreach my $envo(sort keys %{$marketMsgHsh{$plugin}{environments}})
{
    $DEBUG && msg("sharing $envo");
    $Totals{$envo}=&share( {} );
    $DEBUG && msg("done.");
    foreach my $messageType(sort keys %{$marketMsgHsh{$plugin}{messageTypes}})
    {
        $Totals{$envo}{$messageType}=0;
    }
}
msg("done.");
...