Thanks for the reply beauregard.

You are right, this was one of the major sources of crashes - however, I'm still left with that crash on a malloc in the C thread.

I've done a little more digging, and I'm wondering if it's because there is no Perl interpreter built in that C thread. If the standard Perl headers are used, then malloc gets redefined to use perl pointers associated with the thread - and since perl hasn't been set up: Boom! If this is the case, how do I get around that? I'm assuming it should be just a case of using the OS malloc/free for all memory management, then it shouldn't matter if a Perl interpreter has been built or not?

Thanks.