I must say, i loved this post. This is how i learned embedding, and ran into many similar problems. The best companion i found is Extending and Embedding Perl (Manning). It covers alot of the small things that the perl docs don't.

The only thing i can say, from my experiance, is that using Perl from diffrent threads (not creating threads with use Threads, but diffrent threads in an embedding application) is a big no-no. I have not worked with perl 5.8, but if you are running under 5.6.1, i think you will find it does not claim to be thread-safe, and, well, isnt :(. Hopefully someone else will post and say i am wrong, but i am afraid you may have to marshall all Perl calls into one thread and work from there.

In a CB Style ...
MZSanford Raises glass
<MZSanford> Here's to hoping i am wrong