i've been able to track down a little.

i realized that my $host object is NOT going to have the needed elements to continue if I can't instantiate the new SNMP::Session. so I'm putting in checks for that. i've gotten the stack failure on numbers as small as 7 iterations. . .

i wish i knew for sure where/ what was making it bug out. i've never seen this error type before!

so, wow! i crashed perl!