Fellow monks I’m working on a class to automate IE. As part of that automation I need to support popups (NewWindows). I’ve encountered a problem that crashes PERL and have isolated it in the following code. Curiously, if the push that attempts to save the created IE's is commented out the code does NOT CRASH. I’m not sure why. Does anyone have any clues? Does the code work OK elsewhere? I’m completely mystified and uncertain where to look next.

YOU MUST DISABLE ALL POPUP BLOCKERS to test this code.

Slightly updated version of code (a bit easier to read).

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# this site has a large number of popup tests
# http://www.kephyr.com/popupkillertest/test/index.html
# http://www.kephyr.com/popupkillertest/test/test1.html ... 23

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
use Win32::OLE qw( EVENTS );
use Time::HiRes qw(gettimeofday);

my $self = {};
my $ie = Win32::OLE->new( 'InternetExplorer.Application' ) or
    die "error";
$ie->{visible} = 1;
Win32::OLE->WithEvents( $ie, \&ie_events, 'DWebBrowserEvents2' );
$self->{ie} = $ie;
$self->{popups} = [];
$self->{ts} = $self->{tle} = gettimeofday;
print "self after initialization\n" . Dumper( $self );
$|=1;       # do not buffer

sub navto($);

# causes popup on 1st 2 loads
#navto( 'http://www.cnn.com/' );

# no popup
navto( 'http://www.google.com/' );

# single popup
navto( 'http://www.kephyr.com/popupkillertest/test/test1.html' );

# two popups
navto( 'http://www.gozer.org/mozilla/popup_tester/' );

# no popup
navto( 'http://www.whitehouse.gov/' );

print "\n";
print "--------------------------------------------\n";
print "--------------------------------------------\n";
print "should see this if all is OK\n";
print "--------------------------------------------\n";
print "--------------------------------------------\n";

sub navto($){
    my $url = shift;
    @{$self->{popups}} = ();
    $self->{ts} = $self->{tle} = gettimeofday;
    print "\n===================================================\n";
    print "navigate to $url\n" . Dumper($self);
    $ie->navigate( $url );
    while(gettimeofday - $self->{ts} < 60){
        Win32::OLE->SpinMessageLoop;    # check for events
        last if( gettimeofday - $self->{tle} > 10 );
    }
    print "done $url\n" . Dumper( $self );
}

sub ie_events(){
    my( $ie, $event, @args ) = @_;
    
    my $tn = gettimeofday();
    $self->{tle} = $tn;
    
    my $te = sprintf '%6.2f', $tn - $self->{ts};
    print "$self $ie $te [$event]\n";

    if( $event eq 'NewWindow2' ) {
        print "self before new window handling\n";
        print Dumper($self);
        my $popupself = {};
        my $ie = Win32::OLE->new( 'InternetExplorer.Application' ) or
            die( 'could not start IE on allowed NewWindow2' );
        print "self after new IE application\n"; print Dumper($self);
        $popupself->{ie} = $ie;
        my $xx = $self->{popups};
        push @{$xx}, $popupself; #works when commented out
        print "self after push\n"; print Dumper($self);
        #$args[0]->Put( $ie->{application});
        $args[0]->Put( $ie );
        $args[1]->Put( 0 );
    }
}
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