You didn't say what version of windows you are testing this on. I usually avoid windows, but I ran into a similar problem awhile back, when I was trying to see if a threaded program(which ran fine on linux) would work on windows.

The program created a big hash of shared variables for the threads. On WindowsME, it just crashed after a bit. On WindowsXP it ran fine. So I know there is some big differences in the way Windows handles memory, between versions. The code was something like this:

#############shared hashes for xml processor################# 

my @chs = (1..99);

# setting this to 2 works on windowsME 
# but will bog down over 3, and crash 
# at values like 60  
#WindowsXP ran it fine
my $max_prog_chan = 60;   #XP ok

my %days;
 foreach my $channel(@chs){
   foreach my $count(0..$max_prog_chan){
#print "$channel $count\n"; 

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'};
 }
}
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