You also might want to check and see if any optional modules are missing on the windows side of things. Many modules will use a pure perl version of something if the XS version isn't available, so an operation still works, albeit at a much slower rate.

Not likely in this case. The only modules that could impact performances would be Scalar::Util which would give weaken, but would improves performances only when deleting parts of the tree, and Encode or Text::Iconv if an output_encoding was specified, which is not the case (and would be used only when printing the twig anyway).

Insufficient memory is a definite possibility though.