What kind of data is in @lines? How large is @lines? Is it possible that joining it into a single scalar is causing a buffer or memory overflow when you try to print it on the win32 system (granted, you should see an error)?

Try assigning the join to a scalar and printing the scalar on the win32 system. Or try joining @lines with a delimiter and splitting it again (if you want to prove the join statement works).

Anyway, I'm no monk, these were just my initial thoughts.

-Bird