It works OK on perl-5.8.4 (Debian Unstable). Some redhat distros have very bad problems with UTF - you should supersearch for that. I think you need to set up the locale correctly before it will work on redhat.
Comment on Re: HTML Entities segfault - malformed utf8
Thanks. SuperSearch points to problems with redhat and 5.8.0, particularly with the locale settings. But this seems to have been fixed post .8.0, so I'm assuming its something different.