Solaris is my primary Perl platform. I think you'll keep hitting dead ends unless you bite the bullet and upgrade to a newer version of Perl (I'm on 5.6.1; starting to evaluate 5.8) and build it all with gcc. Depending on your experience and access permissions this shouldn't be as hard as it sounds. I recently upgraded a full Perl install with over 250 CPAN modules in less than a day. I have never had success mixing gcc and cc built pieces on Solaris, including the perl binary.