Good News. I just used putty and it connected to the arduino just fine....I have a button connected to a a relay and an led. I just pressed the button and the feedback was sent back to the console screen on Putty. So it does work just as it does on Windows Vista and XP. I will add logging to the perl code and see what that turns up. Same version of perl and win32 serial port on windows vista, 7 and 10.