There is a bug in Perl's handling of the %^H (lexical hints) variable that causes lexical state in one file to leak into another that is required/used from it. This bug will probably be fixed in Perl 5.10.2, and is definitely fixed in Perl 5.11.0, but in any earlier version it is necessary to work around it. On versions of Perl that require a fix, this module globally changes the behaviour of require and use so that they no longer exhibit the bug. This is the most convenient kind of workaround, and is meant to be invoked by modules that make use of lexical state. The workaround supplied by this module takes effect the first time its import method is called. Typically this will be done by means of a use statement. This should be done before putting anything into %^H that would have a problem with leakage; usually it suffices to do this when loading the module that supplies the mechanism to set up the vulnerable lexical state. Invoking this module multiple times, from multiple lexical-related modules, is not a problem: the workaround is only applied once, and applies to everything.