Perl 5.004m4, which ships on the RHL 5.2 discs, is bad.

It breaks majordomo horribly, generates spurious messages
in various other places, and in general has broken a LOT
of stuff, and cost many hours of futile debugging.

The fix is to:

rpm --force -Uvh perl-5.004-4.i386.rpm

and then things returned to normal.