.I thought that since the procXml sub worked just fine, it would not be relevant to the discussion or potential solution.

You were mostly right. The only relevance it has is that nowhere in that code do I see any sign of locking (the keyword 'lock' does not appear), which means that multiple threads are writing to a shared hash and there is nothing to prevent them from corrupting data through collisions.

You may 'get away with it', but I wouldn't want to be responsible for when things go wrong.