I don't think it is Perl, (well yes, perl does call free() once in a while), but rather win32 memory manager that keeps memory for the process for a while.

As for whittling down, I'd suggest being a bit more creative :) for example, yes indeed, you cannot take MS-to-OO transition out, but you can pre-create the OO documents that correspond to the MS ones, and change the program so that instead of running the actual conversion, it loads the corresponding OO doc from the disk. The same is valid for OO-to-text - comment out the OO part, but save the text separately and use in in the reduced program.

hope this help, /dk