The Perl Deverlopment kit also runs $200, and that's a bit much to avoid learning Win32::Daemon or Srvany.

Traveller, Srvany is embarassingly easy to use, so if you just need it running all the time and don't care to get Down and Dirty with Windows, it's the way to go.

Win32::Daemon allows to to run a real service that will respond to starts and stops, configuration changes, etc, etc, etc.... Jenda also has a Win32::Daemon::Simple module. The only real drawback here is that there is extra coding to put in, and you start to understand the Windows internals, and how services act.

It's my experience that the Roth module takes longer to get used to, as it wants you to rearrange your code, but in the long run it is more elegant than the "Simple" module. (As the term simple implies...)