Did you have to set manually the "way to open this file is thru perl.exe? I didn't! And I don't have the same problem luckily. On this Windows 2000 box the extension .pl is associated to C:\Perl\bin\Perl.exe "%1" %* where %* would be equivalent to all the arguments passed initially on the command-line to the script. So %* == %2 %3 %4 %5 etc