By all means, go with what's comfortable. I didn't really grok all your code, but personally I hate thread management, and I like that "threads" takes care of a lot of that for you. And, "threads::shared" handles the passing and locking of shared data quite well.

I saw you mention the perl upgrade issue in your OP - I kicked it again because I've had intermittent thread issues in the past that simply disappeared by upgrading perl from 5.8 to 5.12.