Can you please post your code so we can see what you're trying to do, and how?

Strawberry Perl handles command line arguments perfectly fine. Here's an example:

use warnings;
use strict;

if (@ARGV != 3){
    print "Program requires 3 arguments\n";
    exit;
}

my ($one, $two, $three) = @ARGV;

print "arg1: $one, arg2: $two, arg3: $three\n";
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output:

> perl def.pl
Program requires 3 arguments

> perl def.pl 1 2 3
arg1: 1, arg2: 2, arg3: 3
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If you require anything more elaborate than sending in a small number of simple args, there's the Getopt::Long distribution.

I am mostly interested in calling from another script. I've tried qx, backticks, and system. So Eventually I tried simply from the command line, like. "scriptname.pl 09 12 34likj" No dice. My code is basically

my $i = 0 ; 
for ( @ARGV ) {
 $i++ ; 
 print "i:$i for argv $_\n" ; 
}
print "$i is the final index of argv\n" ;
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All my scripts work fine in win7 + activeperl

your file association is wrong. You need %* after the "%1" in the command your association runs.

Also, please don't use PRE or CODE tags for normal text. See <pre> Versus <code> Tags for details.

Normally I click on a perl script and it calls a 2nd script, successfully passing args via qx() and successfully getting the output. I also tried simply typing in the name of the script to a cmd window and put the args after it. The script did not see the command line args.

Have you tried running your second script as "perl script.pl arg1 arg2 ..." instead of "script.pl arg1 arg2 ..."? You might need to add the full path to the Perl binary, which you can normally get from $^X (or Config's $Config{perlpath}, as documented in the first link). Also note my node here in regards to the potential issues with using qx//.