Darn. Didn't think of that. Looks like you're back to one of the other two options ;(

Or, you could try NSNMP::Simple with your threaded/synchronous requests approach. A quick look at the source shows it be be pure perl and doesn't use any globals. There are a couple of lexical globals used via closure, but they should be relatively safe. The author says it's not ready for prime time, but maybe it will just work for you. Worth a shot.