You're welcome. Helping people is what open source is all about.

Perl 5.8.1 is not really related to Perl 6, but it is an attempt to fix some things that were not so great in previous versions, like threads and unicode. Unfortunately these resulted in a significant slowdown, even for code that doesn't use those features. I'm using Perl 5.6.1 for the moment, and will probably stick with it until I need something that doesn't support that version any more.