When I think about the amount of plumbing it would take to do this right, my head hurts. It would be SO much easier to write the component in VB, and call a perl DLL when necessary.

As an perly alternative, you may want to consider writing a web service which is currently more in fashion (although slower than COM+), but, your app may use a small number of calls to this, in which case, you get an OS-agnostic portable component.