Hi
I think the simplest solution would be to share the directory with the files on the win95 machine, mount it on the linux machine (using smbmount i think, part of the handy samba package (as in linux package, not perl package)) and then use the Net::Ftp (or whatever package it is) to get the file, and to do your string parsing try doing a substitution on the binary ppt files and hope that the checksumming that is doubtless in the file format ignores the length of strings.

Good luck