Perl with or without threads

Hello, Has anyone tried to replace the existing perl 5.8.0 from SuSE 8.2 ? My problem is that the default perl installation has threads enabled and some of my applications refuse to use threads. It is a bit strange that SuSE suddenly starts to enable threads in their perl installation. The vanilla version of perl does not have threads by default. I have tried to install a second perl - but with no luck as I get errors regarding NDBM_file and ODBM_file. Kim