I think the open is waiting on a socket connection to be established with the pipe
What makes you think that? Perl's open is smart, but I do not think it's so smart it actually knows the command it's executing is going to open a socket, and is going to wait for that.
So the question is do I really needs threads to solve this problem and if so how, OR is there just some faster way to get the pipes to open?
No, you don't
need threads. The classical solution is a select loop (which you can do easily in Perl, and there are also some CPAN modules for it; POE for instance). Alternatively, you can fork.
If it's just a matter of opening a bunch of pipes, and reading a single line from each of them, I'd opt for select loop. Care should be taken, don't use readline, but a read.
