hmm... i'm reflecting your problem, and i can't say i know a solution. but two things come into my mind: first, if you localize hooks for the standard signals, you might get an error message even if perl itself doesn't produce one, e.g.:

local $SIG{HUP} = $SIG{TRAP} = ... = \&sig_message;
...
sub sig_message {
   my $sig = shift;
   print STDERR "Got signal $sig\n";
}
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the second thought that i have is that one shouldn't always trust berkeley db's. at least with GDBM_File i encountered severe data losses. if you don't like to rely on a sql-database, and the amount of data is manageable you'll possibly better off with using plain files. if you serialize your data hashes via Storable.pm you'll get clear and reproducable results.