Indeed, that would be ideal. However, exceptionally unlikely.

The even clunkier solution was to throw the URL at chrome via a system call and then look for the file in the end user's download directory. I have a working proof of concept of this, but woo buddy that's taking serious liberties with the TIMTOWTDI idea.

I've got a couple other ideas that are slightly less bush league, but I using native windows auth would be ideal.

The even clunkier solution was to throw the URL at chrome via a system call and then look for the file in the end user's download directory.

There are some modules to easily drive Firefox/Chrome on CPAN: chrome, chromium ...

As a follow-up, in case any other sad sad person wants to do something silly like me.... It appears that the least clunky, but still not 100% Perl solution is to use PowerShell to grab the file. This works for my situation because most of the desktops have PowerShell installed as part of my company's default image and for those who don't, it's approved software on our internal Software Center. In any event, the relevant PS code snip is:

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $REMOTE -OutFile $LOCAL -UseDefaultCredentials

Specifically, that "UseDefaultCredentials" will tell PS to throw your windows login info to the server. I've not actually integrated into my scripts, but as a proof of concept, it works.