This is going to sound crazy, I know, but I have a feeling DBI is actually paying some kind of attention to the internal type of the presented variables.
I pretty much got the same gut feeling. It's not doing it intentionally, though...
I gather that Perl's scalars have a pretty large internal representation, and perl turns one representation into another when needed if it didn't exist yet, on the fly. You say the one case that fails is numerical, while the other ones are strings. So only this one needs to be converted to a string.
My guess is that, when Perl does this conversion, something goes astray, and modifies a bit (or a few more) in a location that doesn't belong to this scalar's structure. It could well be that this always happens, but that most of the time, we don't notice. After all, you say you're using 5.8.0, and not too many many people are using that yet. Well, my guess is that in your particular case, this stray modified bit is in this DBI statement handle, thereby corrupting it, and this is what throws this spurious error.
All just speculation, really. :-)
ps. What's the value of Re xor 2, anyway? ;-)
