I use a silly little script to display a countdown and then start Winamp playing after it's done. Recently I had to reformat my computer, and I found that after I had reinstalled the latest version of Activestate Perl, the script would hang with 100% CPU usage between 5 seconds and a minute after being started. What's going on here?

#!perl

use Win32::Console;

my $con = Win32::Console->new();

sub snooze
{
    #generate random snooze time
    return (11*60) + rand(60*5);
}
sub display_countdown
{
    my $countdown = shift;
    $hours = ($countdown/3600)%24;
    $mins = ($countdown/60)%60;
    $secs = $countdown%60;

    if ($hours < 10) { $hours = "0".$hours; }
    if ($mins < 10) { $mins = '0'.$mins; }
    if ($secs < 10) { $secs = '0'.$secs; }

    $con->WriteChar('['   , 0, 0);
    $con->WriteChar($hours, 1, 0);
    $con->WriteChar(':'      , 3, 0);
    $con->WriteChar($mins , 4, 0);
    $con->WriteChar(':'   , 6, 0);
    $con->WriteChar($secs , 7, 0);
    $con->WriteChar(']'   , 9, 0);

    $con->Display;

}

my $c = eval($ARGV[0]);
$SIG{INT} = 'IGNORE';

while(1) {
    while ($c > 0) {
        display_countdown($c);
        sleep(1);
        $c--;
    }
    system(q(C:\Program Files\Winamp\PlayPause.exe));
    $c = snooze;
}
[download]

I've tried not using Win32::Console and removing the interrupt signal handler line but to no avail. Other scripts seem to run OK. Also, I can make the script hang earlier by viewing the process information for perl.exe in systeminternal's process explorer. I've no clue what's going on - any ideas?