Hi Rob, I have had endless trouble installing "interesting" modules on my work machine. No Idea why, but I've found it impossible to install Tk against any version of Strawberry Perl I care to try and a multitude of other modules (which I don't remember) have given grief. I installed Win32::IPC and rerun the Inline::C install. It at least completes now, but fails most of its tests. So I installed it with force. Your sample code then at least starts running, but fails with:

"C:\STRAWB~2\perl\bin\perl.exe" -MExtUtils::Command -e mv -- noname_pl
+_cf1b.xsc noname_pl_cf1b.c
gcc -c  -iquote"D:/Scratch~~/PerlScratch" -DWIN32 -D__USE_MINGW_ANSI_S
+TDIO -DPERL_TEXTMODE_SCRIPTS -DPERL_IMPLICIT_CONTEXT -DPERL_IMPLICIT_
+SYS -DUSE_PERLIO -fwrapv -fno-strict-aliasing -mms-bitfields -s -O2  
+ -DVERSION=\"0.00\" -DXS_VERSION=\"0.00\"  "-IC:\STRAWB~2\perl\lib\CO
+RE"   noname_pl_cf1b.c
cc1.exe: error: unrecognized command line option "-iquoteD:/Scratch~~/
+PerlScratch"
gmake: *** [Makefile:333: noname_pl_cf1b.o] Error 1

A problem was encountered while attempting to compile and install your
+ Inline
C code. The command that failed was:
  "gmake" with error code 2
...
[download]

I'm not going to pursue this at work, but I may pick it up again at home.