You're right, I don't think this is a perl issue. But I have run into similar problems in the past.

I believe that by default, the network shares aren't available when there's no user logged in.

I think that can be corrected by changing the "Schedule" service to run as a user. I don't remember if by itself, that's enough to mount the drives, but you could probably also wrap the exe call in a batch file that mounts the drives if they're not already there, but you have to make sure the user Schedule runs as is allowed to access the network.

Of course, you could have some other, completely different, problem. Aren't computers fun? :)

(I'm not even gonna blame NT for this one, since there are similar traps waiting in the Unix world...)
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Mike