Bizarre cpan problem

[Matt Lawrence]

CPAN falls over every time it tries to read metadata, which precludes
just about any activity. After mucking about in the debugger for a
spell, I narrowed it down to the Storable::retrieve line in CPAN::Index.

$ perl -MStorable -e 'retrieve ".cpan/Metadata"'
Out of memory!

.cpan/Metadata is 5.9M

CPAN 1.7601
Storable 2.13

Anyone seen anything like this before?

Matt