{I hope this works; it appears PM is having problems today; my browser keeps saying that the page doesn't exist}

Well, what you are saying sounds familiar(in C/C++ it happens a lot w/ classes, and is called shallow vs. deep copying). I don't know of any modules that have this, but I can give you some advice:

(1)Recursive is definately the way to go
(2)Make variables lexically scoped, i.e., with *my*; perl won't delete these variables if there's a ref. to them, but if the funtion's called again(e.g., recursively) it'll create a new copy of them
(3)Post your code here if you have any problems