I'm only getting this behaviour with winmgmts, not with every Win32::OLE->GetObject call, so I'm not surprised there's nothing to find in the source for Win32::OLE. OTOH, I have no idea how OLE works, and I'm a bit surprised that any module can have such wide-reaching effects on perl.

Anyway, thanks for introducing me the the cpan tools, I hadn't seen them before.