nukeboy,
However, I am struggling with find::file so I went back to “Learning Perl” and came up with this:

Note that my code uses File::Find::Rule which has a very user friendly interface (as opposed to File::Find). I am not sure what was difficult to understand from my example but it does exactly what you asked for.

I will comment on a few snippets of your code.

opendir DH, $dir_to_process
# Use a lexical ($dir) instead of a bareword global (DH) if possible
[download]

if ($file =~ /\.txt$/) 
# This would break for a directory called dir.txt - see perldoc -f -X
[download]

%stuff_to_store = ($dir_to_process, $file);
# This overwrites the hash entirely every time
[download]

while (%stuff_to_store) {
# this will be an infinite loop if the hash contains any items
[download]

Please note: Your code will only search the current directory - it will not descend into sub directories. Out of curiosity, how much time did you spend with the code I wrote before you gave up on it? It really does 97% of what you asked.