I'm not saying Perl should never run for more than a fixed number of seconds. Of course perl scripts should do this. But when perl is launched from Apache or IIS it should have a set timeout. One that can't be broken by the users hitting his stop or refresh button.

You're looking for a solution in the wrong place. If a webserver starts a process, it is the webserver's responsibility to kill it. Implementing a timeout like that in perl is trivial but it is the wrong solution and you're simply not going to convince anyone with this trite hogwash. Pretend you're ActiveState and distribute your own version of perl which implements this.