Thanks. I had considered overriding the locale in a sub using setlocale, but the setlocale docs indicate that it affects things globally and is not thread safe on some systems.
However, I had not considered using no locale. I'll have to give it a test.
As for activating the locale, there is no locale-setting code in my codebase. In the original case it was caused by the Gtk2 module when it was loaded. Having now side-stepped it for Gtk2, there is always the risk it will manifest if I use some other library. I guess I will have to audit such libs before adding them as dependencies.