Most importantly you didn't mention on which system you are doing this. Although threads provide the same API on every system Perl runs on, internally the implementations need to glue themselves to very different underlying OS features.

From the fact that you just downloaded 5.8.2 (and did not compile) I would guess you're running this under a Win32 system. If it is an ActiveState build, please report your problem with ActiveState.

If you are however running on a *nix system and compile perl's yourself, please compile one with debugging enabled (add -Doptimize='-g' to configure) and try to force the coredump to be saved to disk (try ulimit-c unlimited and run gdb perl corefile on the coredump file to get a backtrace. And report that backtrace back here, or to p5p.

That would be helpful in fixing this problem before 5.8.3, of which the code freeze is Real Soon Now.

Liz