Phew: I knew I should have studied my NT harder... some good questions, and I've already said in orig. node that I don't recommend trying this

On the other hand I think that the instructions above are correct. I don't think that the shell extension is doing anything in particular with Perl - but I may have misunderstood the question.

I think the process is

• When the user tries to drop an input file onto a .pl script, NT checks the registry and see .pl => perl
• It then checks HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\perl\Shellex\DropHandler to see if it has a registered drophandler.
• If the drophandler exists, it is run. Presumably it is passed the details of a) the dropped input file and b) the perl script
• As the handler shell32.dll on my system seems to deal with .bat, .com, .pif, .scr and other files that existed from way before OLE, I think that all it does is the equivalent of the command line  "%1" "%2" e.g. runs the exe with the parameter of the dropped file.
• (Which would explain why it worked - for me - for Perl.) The perl dll's aren't having to be registered to do any playing with shell extensions. It's just Shell32.dll spawning a new process similar to what it does on the command line.

That's my guess anyway!

Cheerio!
Osfameron