Let me give it a shot.

First off, let me make sure I understand. You have a reference to an object, and you are dereferencing that ref in print statements, wondering whats going on, right?

If you have a reference to an object, then the destruction of that reference will not invoke a call to a DESTROY method, only the objects actual destruction will. The objects destruction will occur in a pass before destruction of anything else. If you have a reference to an object, and the object is destroyed first (which it should be) the the reference points to nothing - undef. If the the scalar holding the reference to the object is itself undefed, and the object still exists, then this may be inconsistent with Perl's two pass out-of-the-pool system (where objects go first, so that their DESTROY methods can safely operate on variables in the environment). But, if you simply have a reference to the object, and you dereference that reference, then it should come up undef after global object destruction and before destruction of everything else.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Erik

Update: I just realized this is my 100th post. Yay!