in reply to Insert a new key (that is a hash) to a hash

You're mixing up hash references with hashes in your syntax. The 9/16 is you hash in a scalar context, not the hash itself.

You want something more like:
my %hashList = (); ... $hashList{$count} = \%secondHash; ... my $hashtemp = $hashList{$count}; while ( my ($key, $value) = each ( %$hashtemp ) ) { ... }