Can you pass a -d at startup? If you can, you can use the PERLDB_OPTS environment variable to get a good dump of what was executed in perl before the failure.

For example:

PERLDB_OPTS="o f=5 NonStop=1 LineInfo=db.out" perl -d -V
[download]

This will put a whole lot of information in a file db.out. The verbosity of the information can be changed with the value of f. Documentation says it goes up to 30.

Details on PERLDB_OPTS are located in perldebguts

This would at least tell you what perl was doing when it cores.