Thanks,

So this is not normal. It is definitely occuring for us with 64 bit perl 5.8.8 running on Red Hat EL5. I think our perl comes from the default perl rpm which comes with Red Hat. Unfortunately we are not in a position to try other versions. We do not see this issue with perl 5.10 running on Ubuntu.

Anyway, we have discovered a workaround. While
perl -IDIR
does not "work" (include the arch dirs), it does "work" if we change out shell scripts to use
perl -mlib=DIR

Thanks again for your feedback