If it occurs with an application that dosn't use any third-party extensions, then it's a bug in perl. You say that the third plaform "works fine" but that the error also occurs on the third platform, so I'm not entirely certain whether the problem is with perl 5.8.1 or not.

Anyway, if it's an older version of perl, you can avoid the problem by upgrading; if it's on a newer version, then try to to strip your code down to a simple reproducable case and report it as a bug.

Dave.