Second, there seems to be a property whose value itself recurses, because I keep getting the same properties over and over after a short period of time

When you brought up your problem in the CB, I postulated that the reason you were running our of memory is that properties formed an infinite loop. You've just confirmed this.

The problem isn't in Data::Dumper. It detects loops in data.

$ perl -MData::Dumper -e'my $x = {}; $x->{x} = \$x; print Dumper $x'
$VAR1 = {
          'x' => \$VAR1
        };
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The problem is that Win32::OLE doesn't do such checks. When it receives an object, it create a new Perl object to serve as a bridge. Data::Dumper correctly thinks this is a different object, so it proceeds to dig deeper.