Is my example clear enough -- have other run into this? It's almost like I need to have my 'use vars' statement return a reference which seems pretty non-standard. Ideas?

No, it isn't clear what you're talking about (what you're doing, what you're asking, is the problem organization of implementation...).

Sounds like you're using a lot of global vars in a kind of overloaded way (everything is "Foo") but it means different things in different contexts...

The typical way (say log4perl) is to give things names, the things that need to be unique have unique, other things share names

But this is only a guess