INIT blocks, hmmm, that reminds me, there was a thread on this sometime back: Which phase am I in?. In that thread, tilly pointed out that that require'ing a module will skip the INIT blocks:

#! /usr/local/bin/perl -w
use lib '.';
require 'foo.pm';
print "running\n";

# foo.pm
package foo;
INIT { warn "foo init\n" }
1;
[download]

Running the above produces...

Too late to run INIT block at foo.pm line 2.

... which may be something for the OP to keep in mind.