I do care that Perl is crashing, but I am running a production environment and if I Perl crashes upon exiting the script, then I can live with that until I can debug the cause. We run a fairly complex computing infrastructure with multiple machines that some would define as a grid computing system. We run 100's of jobs a day processing statistical information about the market. Some of the workflows are executed sequentially, so if one appears to never end, the next one in the series will not start and our data becomes stale which can lead to bad business decisions. We do use Win32::Process because we do need to control the tasks we start. This environment has been running for almost 4 years and we haven't had a problem until now and it's on a single server that we brought online. I appreciate everyone's comments, but for now I was just trying to find an answer to my question.