Thanks,
It turns out the problem was specific to windows and the MVFS filesystem provided by ClearCase from IBM/Rational. The same filesystem viewed from *nix coincidentally doesn't have the problem when using sysopen()...ugh

It also turned out that any other piece of software couldn't open these same kind of files with a '*' in it in windows/MVFS, and the error message from $! was something like "Invalid filename". Copying the file to a different filesystem like NTFS worked fine.

Hope this obscure problem happens to someone out there at some point..