G'day Sandy,

"I guess - but am not sure - that they replaced perl with a newer version"

This sounds like you're using and modifying the system Perl. I wrote about this just yesterday: "Re: Perl/Tk and PAR::Packer on OS X". The first half of that post relates to the system Perl issue.

From your update, it would appear that X11, not Perl, may have been the cause of the problem. Nonetheless, I would still recommend installing your own version of Perl.

I'm using Mac OS X 10.7.5, so I can't provide any specific information on your old (10.8) or new (10.9) versions.