This isn't directly aimed at you Joost, but it seemed the most appropriate place to mention that unfortunately, the patch for the shared memory leak doesn't appear to work, leastwise not when applied to either AS 5.8 or to 5.8.0-RC3 freshly downloaded and built for Win32 using BCC.

There is also new discussion in the thread you linked at RT.perl.org to the same effect.

My best guess is that bleadperl (whatever and whereever that is?) also contains other patches that aren't a part of the latest version available via ftp/CPAN that are also required. Unfortunately, I don't understand the ticketing system. I tried to access the patch via the #19200 number listed on it and got a permission error and ended up applying the patch through cut&paste from the thread.

(As an aside, has any other Opera user with a perl.org/rt.perl.org login succeeded in logging in there using Opera? I can get in using IE5.5, but don't like using that other than for compatibility checks.)