I have no idea how this works from a UNIX box.

It doesn't. Although I have heard of people working on porting Win32::TieRegistry to Unix, I haven't heard of any results and I suspect that the remote access stuff is not part of it.

As to the original question, it would help to know what version of Win32::TieRegistry is being used (and what version of Win32API::Registry as well), and what $^E is. It is also better to use regLastError() [ which requires use Win32API::Registry qw( regLastError ); ] instead of $^E (which can get overwritten, especially with some versions of Perl).

Using Win32::NetResource is perhaps a cleaner way to authenticate to the remote machine if that is part of the problem.

        - tye