I wasnt going to remove .exe or .dll from any list, I did earlier add .PL; to the PATHEXT.. I do need to hunt the registry...

problem is, I want this to be "reasonably" easy to use on different machines. I was ultimately going to try and compile the .pl to an .exe and .dll, (which probably would solve this issue.. chicken or egg kinda of thing..)

I use PerlBuilder IDE to help me, steps through code nicely, allows me to to see "whats on perls mind" even if its only on the surface. I hoped to discover exactly how args were passed, then use the IDE to send the args exactly the same way for development