May be I tried not enough, I did not succeed doing properly using your way.

I tried using ASSOC, ftype in a different ways, but succeeded much less than 100%, mostly because I was not able to teach system about STDIN/STDERR/STDOUT redirections. (because something is going fishy on Win32 platforms:)

Additionally, in my case I am not OS-specific (I think win95 will behave differently in respect of 'ftype' and 'assoc'), but, most importantly, I now able to use my script everywhere in our room at work, I do not need to remember whether this is set up properly on user's systems.

As one more argument, after I compiled that program using both console and windows mode (two executables, one of them GUI, one console), I am free to choose appropriate mode, just copy appropriate executable and all is done.
via associations I associate with perl.exe or wperl.exe, but not some this way and some - another way.

BTW C is not that bad, you'll benefit when using both Perl and C :)

Good luck and best wishes to you!