tinypig,
Forgive me, but I work on *nix mostly. I believe the way Win32 does the launching is by having explorer look at the registry. There is a section of the registry devoted to file association. It says what application to launch and with what parameters.

I did a quick search on CPAN and couldn't find anything that did exactly what you are looking for, but you might want to have a look at:

Tie::Registry written by tye

Win32::Registry::File

Basically what you are going to want to do is determine the file extension, look up its association in the registry, and launch the application with the correct parameter to open the file. notepad.exe file for example.

Cheers - L~R

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