I have spent far too many cycles on this...

Well, goodness!!! I'd accuse you of being obsessive or something, but I think you'd take that as a compliment :).

I appreciate all of the work you've done, and I see it's been quite a lot. I've been busy myself, off working on my original original problem, though I don't have much interesting to show for it yet.

I did some preliminary reading on Math::Pari, but was put off by the documentation. I also read that Math::Pari was built on top of GMP, and Math::BigInt can use that too. If Math::Pari gives me all of the factors, I might use that instead.

Again, thanks for all the work (and it looks like you had fun with it).