As I said, it never gets past the first tie statement.

I don't believe you can know that, because you're printing to a tied filehandle. Now maybe you ran the code in the debugger and verified it, or maybe you looked in the appropriate log, or read the code of the tie class, but that's certainly not obvious. You need to know where the program really is ending if you want to hope to debug it.

Do you know of any outstanding issues with tie?

It's been around and well-tested in the core for over a decade, so my instinct tells me to look in the class to which you're tieing after you've identified where the problem occurs.