Ahem...

I said that I would “report back” on this thing once I’d figured it out.   Well, I did.   And it turns out that the whole thing was (as I had begun to suspect...) totally and completely bogus.

I downloaded the most-recent version of this package from CPAN, and installed it into a local directory (using use lib to add it to the search-path of the application in question), and the entire problem magically “went away.”

Suspicious now, I diffed the installed code against the latest incarnation, and discovered that the installed code had (obviously) been rather extensively modified.   Looks to be debugging-code, or something-or-other, that was never taken out.   (Presumably, the person who did it is “many miles away by now,” and I actually hold no grudges at all against him or her.)

So... “false alarm.” Now we (all) know.