Yes I did notice that you could turn the atime off so it's reliable.
Luckily enough I managed to get my hands on the long lost Win32::AdvNotify package which you can find at http://idnopheq.perlmonk.org/perl/packages.

I then wrote up a little script (see below) that tells you when a change occurs, what type of change it is and what file/folder was affected - it's simply grand !!!
Thanks for your input and here's my code :
NB: you need Win32::API and Data::Dumper as well as the Win32::AdvNotify packages.

use strict;

use Data::Dumper;
use Win32::AdvNotify qw (Yes No All);


my $obj = new Win32::AdvNotify() or 
   die ("Can't create AdvNotify object");

(my $thread=$obj->StartThread(Directory=>"d:\\brossad",Filter=>All,
             WatchSubtree=>Yes)) 
or die ("Can't start thread.");

$thread->EnableWatch() || die "Problem starting EnableWatch()\n";

while (!$obj->Wait(200)) # time in milliseconds
{
print ".";#wait and see
}

my @data;
my $ret = $obj->Read(\@data);
print Dumper(@data);

# very important line - don't forget it
$thread->Terminate();

$obj->Free;
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