Upgrade to perl 5.6.1. XML::Writer passes 'make test' fine for me. BTW, if you look at all the results of CPAN testing here you'll see that it does fail testing, but all the perl versions are 5.6.0. Maybe it should be retested with 5.6.1. 5.6.0 is not a good version to be on anyway.

Just for kicks you could see if it works on 5.7.2...

Update:Found this in the Changes file for 5.6.1:

# Hmm, this is from before 5.6.0 maybe it got fixed
# and broke again and was fixed again

[  4195] By: gsar on 1999/09/19  21:30:18
        Log: avoid clearing @_ at all for faster subroutine calls;
        fix bugs in passing around references to @_,
        eg C<sub foo { \@_ }>; add tests for the same
     Branch: perl
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