There is a good article that explains the problems you are running into. I ran into them also...

The article is by, Stephen Lidie, he will have his advanced Perl/Tk book out this month (800 pages !!!)

This is one of the many broken things with Win32...you have to do some other form of communication. I choose to spawn a process and use network sockets, but you could choose a pipe or shared memory or ???

It would be nice if we could use threads or fork(), but they are also broken in Win32 ;-(

http://www.samag.com/documents/s=1273/sam05020010/