maybe your post was down voted by people who had no idea what you were talking about and didn't see any indication that it had anything to do with Perl?

something as simple as [code:// ... ] around the word Starman might have tipped folks off so they had some vague clue as to what you were talking about.

You might have also alienated fewer people if, instead of saying "I've tried searching google for starman bugs", you had maybe said that you were aware of the starman issue tracker but didn't see anything there that looked similar.

Or maybe people would have been more inclined to offer advice, and not down vote, if instead of saying "I'm wondering what my code is doing wrong to cause the problem in starman" you had said "here is an example of some code that triggers this behavior in starman, can anyone see anything that might be triggering a problem like: <code>...</code>"

But these are all just guesses.

(see also: How do I post a question effectively?)