. But, it is not quiet reliable enough to put in a batch environment and ignore.

Hm. If it is "not reliable"; how does it break? And why haven't you wrapped that bit in an eval?

Come to that; why are you wrapping bits of the code in eval, why not just wrap all of it? Eg.

sub worker {
    my( ... ) = @_;
    eval {
        ...
        ...
        return 1 if <cond>;
        ...
        1;
    } or threads->create( \&worker, @_ );
}
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Just remember that when you want to quit the thread permanently, to drop out of the bottom of the eval block, or return a true value to avoid the restart.