Hi McA, thanks for your input. You were quite right about hacking Graphviz vs IPC::Run. I made a change almost identical to what you suggested. Now I'm just waiting for another crash.

Uninitialised or left-over objects is usually my first thought with this kind of problem (don't ask me how I know!) but I'm not seeing any signs of steady process growth. It's also a rather odd method of crashing for an OOM fault, although it is still a possibility.

So I'll see what the next lot of diagnostics shows me. Hopefully I won't have to iterate too many times until I find the root cause.