in reply to eval not catching XML Parser die

Segfaults are almost always a conflict of some sort or another. XML::Parser is known to be pretty reliable almost everywhere, except for the few known segfaults when running under mod_perl with older versions of apache. Make sure you're running the latest versions of all the modules (it doesn't look like you are), and you should be fine. Otherwise there's usually very little you can do about it in your perl code.