the losing the ability to shutdown/logoff doesn't really have anything to do w/ perl, it just happens if you use kill and kill off some of the windows system processes, i just put it in as a note to curious hackers.

anything could leave a process running permanently, such as:

#!perl.exe
use CGI qw(:all);
print header();
if (1=1) {
  print "blah<BR>";
}
[download]

If I hit escape or hit the stop button, while this infinate loop is running, the browser stops loading, but the perl.exe process continues to run in memory. It just hangs out there and the Administrator account can't kill it for some reason. If I do the same thing with my linux box, yes I have one, the perl process will die off by itself.

thanks for the mks suggestion, but i'm not paying for any software (yes, i'm cheap and jobless).
--
paul

It shouldn't work that way. I don't have the problem. I am not running Apache but as Browseruk suggested it might be worth upgrading your apache.

As to a free unix like package, you can go the gnu route and take a look at Cygwin