While doing a bit more beefing up on the problem with UNIVERSAL, I came across a posting by Schwern[1] which contains a patch would potentially fix this problem. Unfortunately, it doesn't look to have made it into any released code but is part of bleadperl.
William [1] http://www.mail-archive.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg69701.html -- Knowmad Services Inc. http://www.knowmad.com
