You might want to take a look at the POPfile project on sourceforge since this has developed in a similar sort of way to your project and does have a windows user version as well as a multiplatform perl/CLI version.

There are, I think, 3 separate problems that you face. Each is solvable, but since you have 3 problems you need to solve, looking for a single solution may not be the best.

Problem 1 - GUI front end
Many solutions talking about Tk or Win32::API or ... have been mentioned. All of these will work. However they may require more work than you wish.

An alternative that you may not have thought of is to build a quick and dirty web server and use the web browser your users almost certainly already have to submit files and report status / results. The great advantage of the web server / broswer combo is that you don't have to do any programming of objects and events. The fact that you also are immediately platform independant is nice too.

Problem 2 - hiding the Perl CLI console
This is easy, just setup the shortcut to do
wperl.exe mysctipt.pl

Problem 3 - not requiring that the user have Perl
From the description of your script you would need few if any perl modules. If you created a zip file with wperl.exe, perl56.dll, script.pl and the few libraries you need (say IO::?? File::?? and some basics such as Autoloader.pm) then this could all be installed in a single directory tree on your user's PC irrespective of whether they had perl or not. This is, essentially, the route taken by popfile and it has a number of advantages in comparison with the single .exe solutions you get with perl2exe and its friends. For one it makes patches and updates easy and compact. It also means that if you ever want to do an OS/X version (or Linux or ...) then you don't have to find the other OS equivalents of perl2exe.

Dingus

---

Enter any 47-digit prime number to continue.