Many thanks (and a ++ tomorrow) to zby, crouchingpenguin, dakkar, robartes, Jenda and hiseldl for their insightful replies.

The solution I have come up with is to use the tie functionality within Config::IniFiles and a slightly modified version of robartes regular expression approach. The while loop handles nested tokens (unlikely as they are in my case).

The following is a code snippet of the approach I intend to use. Comments welcome.

#perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
use Config::IniFiles;

my ($appname, $cmdline, $priority, $szProcess);

my %config;
tie %config, 'Config::IniFiles', (-file => 'service.ini', -nocase => 1
+);

my @processesToStart 
    = map { $config{'service'}{$_} }
        grep { /^start[0-9]+/ } 
            keys %{$config{'service'}};


foreach $szProcess (@processesToStart) {

    #Break process down into it's parts
    ($appname, $cmdline, $priority) = split /;/, $szProcess;
    
    #Process cmdline
    while ($cmdline =~ s/%([^%]+)-([^%]+)%/$config{lc $1}{lc $2}/eg) 
        {} 

    #Log and run it    already
    print $cmdline, "\n";
    
} 

__END__

Text of service.ini:

[GENERAL]
scheduledb=e:\users\dbush\schedule.db

[SERVICE]
debug=1
interval=5
start1=browser.exe;browser;NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS
start2=schedule.exe;schedule "localhost:%general-scheduledb%";NORMAL_P
+RIORITY_CLASS

Output:

browser
schedule "localhost:e:\users\dbush\schedule.gdb"
[download]

The other modules mentioned look interesting (esp. Win32::Daemon::Simple) but I'm afraid I'm up against a bit of a deadline. I also didn't mention that the configuration file must be a standard ini as I share it with some C programs.

Thanks again,
Dom.

Update: Corrected output typo.