Thanks for your time as always Ikegami. I tried to get a small piece of runnable code that demonstrated the issue to no avail. Thus I instead tried to give the pieces of code of interest. My apologies for no running code. This is perl 5.12.2
At this point I've gone ahead and removed the clear line as I mentioned in my update. Thus far it seems to be working well, but I'm keeping an eye on it. I'm totally swamped but at some point I'll see if I can dig the problem code out of my repository, reproduce the issue, and give you the output you request.
