Well, I found what the "glitch" was. It wasn't Tk. I declared some shared variables in a deep hash for about 1800 entries.

my %days;
my @chs = qw (1..30);
my $max_prog_chan = 60;

 foreach my $channel(@chs){
   foreach my $count(0..$max_prog_chan){
     share $days{$channel}{$count}{'channel'}; 
     share $days{$channel}{$count}{'channel_info'};
     share $days{$channel}{$count}{'episode_num'};
     share $days{$channel}{$count}{'start'};
     share $days{$channel}{$count}{'stop'};
     share $days{$channel}{$count}{'makedate'};
     share $days{$channel}{$count}{'description'};
     share $days{$channel}{$count}{'title'};
     share $days{$channel}{$count}{'writer'};
     share $days{$channel}{$count}{'director'};
     share $days{$channel}{$count}{'actors'};
     share $days{$channel}{$count}{'rating'};
     share $days{$channel}{$count}{'length'};
     share $days{$channel}{$count}{'category'};
     share $days{$channel}{$count}{'star_rating'};
    }
}
[download]

That just bogged down things on WindowsMe, but linux just whizzed thru it. I changed it to the following and got things to go ( for the most part).

my %days;
my @chs = qw (1..30);
my $max_prog_chan = 60;

 foreach my $channel(@chs){
   foreach my $count(0..$max_prog_chan){
         share $days{$channel}{$count};
    }
}
[download]

So it seems Windows didn't like all those explicitly named shared assignments.