My apologies to Anonymous Monk. I did know that these were OK. However, I did not respond to your question as I should have.

I knew that the assoc assignment was OK because the script did run, as evidenced by the erroneous output. I avoided the ftype question by specifically including the .pl extension in my test. And, in answer to your question, the value of assoc .pl was assigned as "Perl". ftype Perl was (at that time) not assigned a value.

But here is a related question. Does the symbol used in the assoc/ftype values appear anywhere else than these two commands? Specifically, does it matter whether the symbol used is "Perl" or "PerlScript" (or, for that matter, in lc or with caps)?

And finally, I should add that I have since installed Strawberry Perl on the newer of the two Win8 machines and all is well there. I have now done a full "recovery" on the older machine and have not yet reinstalled Perl there.

My apologies to .... I knew ... related quesiton ...

Does the answer matter LloydRice ?

I think I missed your point ("answers ... matter").

It seems there is a third command line issue: the PATHEXT entry. Most installers handle the fourth, the PATH entry. But ".PL;" needs to be included in PATHEXT. And then there are the previously discussed ASSOC and FTYPE settings.