I don't know the Event Viewer too well. I looked at some logs but couldn't find anything related. Probably looked in the wrong place (or didn't know what to look for). Additonal poiters where to look appreciated!

The registry entries, as far as my weak knowledge goes, look o.k.. I also wouldn't exepect a problem here when the vbs works fine.

Dependency Walker reports it can't find GPSVC.DLL and IESHIMS.DLL, but these dependencies are deep down in MGCPCBAUTOMATIONLICENSING.DLL -> ADVAPI32.DLL -> WINTRUST.DLL -> CRYPT32.DLL -> .... Not sure what to make of that.

All three possible values for Win32::OLE->Initialize() don't make a diference.

There's a thread here http://communities.mentor.com/mgcx/thread/6235 about someone with problems porting the same code form vb.net to C#. I'm not sure if his solution (adding a reference to the appropriate COM object in visual studio) has any perl equivalent.