Yeah, and now I am confused too. I never should have offered debugger advice. I am seeing different results too. (on v5.8.0):

# inside - main::changeRS
  DB<1> x $/
0  undef
  DB<2> x \$/
0  SCALAR(0xfab54)
   -> '
'
[download]

I am seeing that the value changes if I evaluate at that point, but if I 'x' the reference I see a new location, but the old value.

Also, I can now no longer reproduce my lexical oddness from before. I think that my one trial silently fell out of the inner scope. Even my local $bar example is behaving as both x \$bar and x $bar.

Loath as I am to say this, (especially with my track record in this thread) I think that this is a bug in the debugger. I am going to test with other special vars...