I guess I posted a bit too soon, I have something which seems to work. Can anybody tell me whether or not i'm doing the forking right?

#!c:\perl\bin\perl

use Net::AIM;
use strict;
use warnings;

my $counter = 0;
my $done;

while (1==1) {
if ($counter <= 3) {
  my $pid = fork();
    if ($pid) {
      print "forking process $counter.\n";
      $counter++;
    } else {
############meat###########################
# pretty much just
# straight copy/pasted from main script
###########/meat###########################
    exit $counter; 
    } 
  } else {
    $done = wait();
    $counter--;
  }
}
[download]

It seems to work brilliantly.