I fear that my suggest might be too high-end for what you're really trying to do, but consider POE -- the Perl Object Environment. It is a framework for creation and management of co-operating multithreaded objects, managed by a kernel... all in Perl!

Here are a few links to documentation on the subject...

POE Central
SourceForge page for POE
A Beginner's Introduction to POE

Good luck! (No, I'm not a POE expert, but I certainly want to be one one day...)

Cheers,
Richard