I have only one test & dev environment. Need to keep it in sync with the prod system.

So? I've more than 190 versions of Perl on my laptop. Perl doesn't refuse to run if more than one version of it is installed. Besides, how would you ever test if a new release doesn't break anything? Upgrade the production system at the same time as the test system? If you can't use your test system to test whether a bug that's hitting is solved in a new version of Perl, your test environment is not good enough.

I will try this at home on my Linux box.

It could very well be that the Linux version doesn't have a problem, where the windows version has. Perhaps the leak is in the kernel.

Abigail