Trying to decide which way to pursue this. Do I have a module missing? Or is there some other issue causing this to be parsed as "U32 *" ?

You could start by posting a url to "Perl::API"? And maybe explain what it does?

Are you talking about Perl-API-0.01 09 Oct 2003?

That is even older than perl-5.10.0 18 Dec 2007

If that is what you're talking about, your next move should be to pretend that it doesn't exist :)

anything that depends on it needs to be written to use the official api