After way too long I've created an Imager 0.44 release candidate. This is available from CPAN as development release 0.43_03.
If you can, please run the Imager test suite. The simplest way to do this is with the CPAN shell:
perl -MCPAN -eshell
test T/TO/TONYC/Imager-0.43_03.tar.gz