I am learning Tk right now and probably can't help you with your main problem, but i was experimenting with something involving multiple top level widgets today and you should know that Tk never lets go of the widget occupied memory after "destroy". i think this is an acknowledged flaw. Today i had a 5mg (resident ram) program double in size after i destroyed/recreated a top level widget ten times! If you have a way to watch this check out it's significance to your situation.

What works great (i will try to come up with some brief code and maybe references) is to start the different top levels "-state=>'withdrawn'" and then make them appear and disappear with "$TL->state('normal')" and "$TL->state('withdrawn')". this way, you only have to deal with the two actual widgets (presuming you don't want sets of them to appear, eg. two progress bars, three progress bars at once) and the amount of memory consumed will remain stable. That may even solve the problem.