After some more digging, I've pretty much come to the conclusion that what I'm trying to do can't be done without mucking around with POE internals....

Here is the code I finally came up with, though I would prefer there were a way to do it without the monkey-patch. On the other hand though, monkey-patching seems to be part of the core for POE. :)

# NOTE: This hasn't really had any testing yet...
package POE::Resource::Sessions::GCIgnore;
use strict; use warnings;
our $VERSION = '0.01';

# monkey-patch into POE::Kernel
package POE::Kernel;

sub _data_ses_collect_garbage {
  my ( $self, $session ) = @_;
  # snipping out the ASSERT_DATA/TRACE_REFCOUNT stuff
  # that was just copied from POE::Resource::Sessions...

  my $count = $kr_sessions{ $session }->[ SS_REFCOUNT ];
  if ( $session->can( 'gc_ignore' ) ) {
    $count -= $session->gc_ignore;
  }
  return if $count > 0;
  $self->_data_ses_stop( $session );
}
[download]