Can you run the second script to process the same data on other systems successfully? If you can, what is the maximum memory utilization on a system where it works?

Is your Windows XP system 32bit or 64bit?

If Windows XP is 64bit, is perl 32bit or 64bit?

If Windows XP is 32bit or perl is 32bit then process virtual memory is limited to 2GB. If this is the case, given the data you are processing, is it reasonable that perl requires more than 2GB memory space?

Are you running the same version of perl and all relevant modules on the Windows XP system as you are on the systems that are working?