Hercynium here, posting as anonymous since the XP should go to the good Mr. g0n for this...

He pointed out to me in the CB a CPAN dist. known as SNMP::Effective, which serves the same purpose as my code - and looks to me substantially more mature. I'm going to try it out in the next few days and report back what I think

I stated above that I had tried every alternative, but I was wrong. I realize now that I skipped SNMP::Effective in my search because I thought I had already looked at it and dismissed it as not being the right tool - and I was right... for a different project.

For the current project, I almost wish I hadn't missed it... *almost*, because I *did* learn a whole bunch about closures and callbacks and the internals of the SNMP module in my efforts!