Dear Monks (and maybe rcaputo in particular),

  Platform:
    osname=MSWin32, osvers=6.3, archname=MSWin32-x86-multi-thread
    uname='Win32 strawberry-perl-no64 5.18.4.1 #1 Thu Oct  2 16:30:08 
+2014 i386'
[download]

This code :

            log_msg(0,"$pfx: starting child with command [$trigger]") 
+if $DEBUG;
                    eval { $kid = POE::Wheel::Run->new(
                            'CloseEvent'  => 'kidclose',
                            'Program'     => $trigger,
                            'StderrEvent' => 'kidstderr',
                            'StdoutEvent' => 'kidstdout',
                            'ErrorEvent'    =>    'errorstate',
                            );
                    };
[download]

results in a program crash (after 5 seconds), and in the following error in the Windows Application Event log :

Application Failure perl.exe 5.18.4.1 in encoding.dll 0.0.0.0 at offset 0000374

(in several versions of Perl, ActiveState and Strawberry). In the logfile of the program calling the above, there is this :

[2016/09/30-21:53:09] [I] process(): starting child with command [E:\M
+IRA\strawberry\perl\bin\perl C:/EFS/bin/(myWheel).pl --debug 2 (...) 
+ "E:\MIRA\Migration\medfolio_test\NxExport\output\Alles/FOLDER_414860
+93_177671_4/OVERVIEW.xml"]
[2016/09/30-21:53:14] [E] select:  at E:/MIRA/strawberry/perl/site/lib
+/IO/Pipely.pm line 127.
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Which would correspond to this section in IO::Pipely.pm :

120:    my $hits = select( my $out_read   = $in_read,
121:                       my $out_write  = $in_write,
122:                       undef,
123:                       5
124:                     );
125:    unless ($hits) {
126:      next if ($! and ($! == EINPROGRESS) or ($! == EWOULDBLOCK));
127:      die "select: $!" unless $hits;
128:    }
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(which (timeout value) "5" above seems to be the time between the 2 log messages above)(and indeed if I change this value in Pipely.pm, the crash happens correspondingly later). The above happens on a Windows 2003 R2 Server. It is quite troubling, because the same calling program and the same "Wheel" program, running on the same data, under the same version of perl (and of POE), on another machine (Windows XP SP3), works perfectly fine. To add to the puzzle : another older version of the same calling program, using the same Wheel starting code as shown above, on the same Win2003 server, works perfectly fine too, since years. The only link that I can think of, with the Event error mentioning "encoding.dll", is that the Wheel program at some point opens a file with UTF-16 encoding, like this :

    my $fh;
    unless (open($fh,'<:encoding(UTF-16)',$ov_file)) {
        ...
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but again, under Windows XP, this works fine, with the same file opened and then parsed. (and before it does that, the Wheel prints some log messages, which normally appear in the same application log above, but in this case do not). Humbly awaiting any idea or suggestion, cause I don't know where to look anymore.