Success! I've recreated the bug!

#!/opt/perl/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $count = 0;

until ($@) {
  $count++;
  eval 'my $abc = 1; $abc++; ';
  unless ($count % 100000) {
    print $count . $/;
    print q(Expect crash) if $count > 999977609;
  }
}

print $@;

This produced:
....
1073700000 - Expect crash
Global symbol "$abc" requires explicit package name at (eval 1073741770) line 1.
So, there is a limit. This was run on perl 5.12.2, though the crashing system runs perl 5.8.9.