Well, to close the book on the tests, I checked ActiveState 522 on Win98SE and got the same results as on NT. <*> returns long filenames--with or without extensions, with or without spaces--and does not do an implicit split on the list when assigning to an array. I can't reproduce the behavior cited by the OP.

However, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, I still believe there are some issues with 522's glob.