My system is running Slackware 9 with a 2.4.20 kernel and I do have the Gnome 2.2 desktop environment installed.
we've heard of this a time or two before --- slack's perl appears to be built without threading enabled, resulting in a hang. ross looked into it a bit, but i don't remember the details, or if he found a workaround.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-perl-list/2003-August/msg00338.html -- muppet <scott at asofyet dot org>