It is a lexical with file level scope. And I suspected that the closures were incrementing the reference count... that's why I tried removing those closures to see what happenned. I guess I was trying to avoid forcing the user to remember to call the finalize method - the people that will use my library are not what you would call expert Perl programmers and I wanted to make it so that changes were not committed unless they knew what they were doing... Thank you for your help - I will most likely just throw in the finalize and perldoc it that way.

oyasuminasai