I have for the most part gotten this working now. I removed Perl 5.6.1, and moved the site_perl/5.6.1 to my /usr/bin, just in case... I uninstalled all the Perl RPMs using --nodeps and when my machine appeared naked of Perl, I re-installed the Perl 5.6.0 RPMs (for what seems like at least the 3rd time...). It all seems fairly clean now, and everything points to /usr/bin/perl. I re-installed all of the Perl modules that Everything requires via CPAN. 1.54 still tried to "upgrade" me to 5.6.1, but I then upgraded to 1.59 (of CPAN.pm), and it finally shut up.

Just FYI, I learned that it is in fact possible to alter @INC (and anything else having to do with Perl) before Apache starts running, by including a directive like

PerlRequire /path/to/startup.pl

in httpd.conf, and putting any use or require statements you'd like to have there. Any modules sourced in there will only have one copy in memory, for all the child Apache processes, which makes it a good place to slurp up frequently used routines. This of course only applies if you've got mod_perl installed...

My Everything still doesn't work, but at least my Perl is clean again... Getting closer though, I can tell...

--
If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going.