Thanks, dchetlin!

The mechanics for doing it with Data::Dumper are the following:

  my %h = (key1=>'value1',
        key2=>{key3=>'value3'});
 
  my $stringy = Dumper \%h;
  {
    no strict 'vars';
    %h = %{eval($stringy)};  
    die"$@" if $@;
  }
[download]

That eval there takes 0.25 seconds on my 17,000 elements hash. This is much better than the 0.47s for uudecoding and thawing of the same hash, but still five times more than the 0.05s of thawing that I would get if that peculiar $Application object worked right.