What the rebless accomplishes though, is that any attempt to interact with the object after the explicit call to DESTROY() will be safely routed to the null class. I agree, your proposed solution would work, but in that case I'd really want to modify all the methods to check _PRE_DESTROY to be safe (I suppose I could do that with a subclass and an AUTOLOAD that performs that check).

I'd really like to just force the ref count of the object to zero and null out all references that exist to it, regardless of where they are. But it seems like the rebless is the next best thing (i.e., I may not be able to find all the references right now, but I can make them all point into nothingness).

And yes, I intend to find the dangling references. This most definitely is a hack. I suspect it's an unintended closure rather than a circular reference.

Thanks for responding.