OK, I think this might have something to do with it. It can't see the .bat file, but I'm able to execute it from the command line in the same directory as my perl script.
Ah...perhaps the .bat file is in a directory in your %PATH% env variable...try hardcoding the entire paths in your script...remember to escape the \ characters for win32 paths...so "c:\mydir\myfile" would be "c:\\mydir\\myfile" -Jason