I don't delve into this much, and may not appreciate the fine points of your question, but how about letting ExtUtils::Installed get the version, instead of loading the module?. Here is an previous snippet from perlmonks on this subject.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use ExtUtils::Installed;
   my $instmod = ExtUtils::Installed->new();
    foreach my $module ($instmod->modules()) {
      my $version = $instmod->version($module) || "???";
        print "$module -- $version\n";
     }
[download]