Well, that was one of the reasons why I did try to keep to the general level, not to scare anyone off. The program processes pretty much anything, like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OpenOffice, html, scanned document images, pdf, text, zipfiles, photos, audio, video, using a lot of modules (at the first level, never mind the ones those are calling) like, but not limited to

# for starting OO2 as a subprocess
use Win32;
use Win32::Process;
# i/f to FineReader
use Win32::OLE qw(in valof HRESULT);
# Win32::OLE->Option(Warn=>2, _Unique => 1); # for debug only
use Win32::OLE::Variant qw(:DEFAULT nothing);
use Win32::OLE::Enum;
use Win32::OLE::Const;
# Modules needed to parse various document types
use HTML::TreeBuilder;
use HTML::Entities ();
use OpenOffice::OODoc;
use Image::ExifTool;
use MP3::Info qw(:all);

I also use system() calls to run external programs.

Now, before anyone gets excited on this or that module, I have used most of the above-listed modules before in another (quite different) incantation of the same program, with no apparent leaks like the ones I'm having now.