Ok, replying to myself because I think I'm tracking down my problem or at least catching a glimpse of it.

I am daemonizing my program in the normal case, so I fork && exit near the top in the primary subroutine that is called if we are to run in daemon mode--but this fork comes after the log object construction. So I'm creating two of the log object, I think...

So I tried breaking out the check for starting in daemon mode, put the log object construction right after the check and before the actual daemonizing subroutine call. So I should have a global $log object throughout either daemon mode, or the non-daemon mode. But alas I still get the error when signalling the program to shutdown (but not immediately on run as I was before, thus the reason I think I'm catching a fleeting glimpse of what is going wrong).

I've commented out the 'undef $log' at the end of the program as a test, but no result...and $log is not going out of scope until the end of the program because it is a global object. So does this mean the DESTROY method is called /after/ all objects are already out of scope? That just doesn't seem correct.

So what am I missing? (I know I'm missing something, because it can't be that DESTROY is called after the object is already gone. Or am I just thinking too hard?)