We are using Active State perl

Is there a reason for not using the stock perl shipped with RHEL3 (5.8.0-89.10 per update 5) ?

glibc detected doesn't instantly mean it is a glibc error. To detect the source of the problem - does that failure produce a core dump? If so, I'd examine that core file with gdb, maybe that gives some hints. If the perl binary doesn't contain debugging symbols, I'd grab the source rpm, edit the spec file for to use the -g compiler flag, rebuild the rpm, install it and produce a core file with that version.

Running the version with debugging flags in gdb could give some clue too; it is helpful to have the perl source tree still around, to pass the location to gdb with the 'dir' command.

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