Does aterm support UTF-8? I Googled your terminal type and it appears it is a colour vt102 emulator. Most terminal drivers only support ASCII, not even ISO Latin 1 let alone UTF-8.
I suggest you add to your loop a write of the characters to a file just before you write to the screen. Make the file handle unbuffered in case it is crashing perl (although that is doubtful, it is worth the precaution). That way you should be able to track down which characters are causing the problem (and if indeed this is the cause) by looking at the output file after the "crash". I find od -xc a useful tool for this kind of issue.

In reply to Re^4: debugging possible memory crash? by cdarke
in thread debugging possible memory crash? by Anonymous Monk

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