Here's my reduced test case:

use strict;
use XML::Simple;

my $xml = q(<?xml version="1.0" encoding="Windows-1256"?>
<stuff>nope</stuff>
);

my $ref = eval { XMLin( $xml ) };

print $@ if($@);

print "About to exit\n";

#exit(0);
[download]

Notice the 'exit(0)' line is commented out. If you remove the '#', the segfault goes away (Linux, Perl 5.6.1).