Depending on the nature of the programs you can look at bypassing VB and using some of the Win32 extensions to do the job. It really depends on what you need to do. A very good place to start is Win32 Perl Programming by Dave Roth from New Riders. This is available at Oreilly's Safari and can show you the basics of bypassing VB or working in tandem with Excel and Access using the OLE/COM interfaces. Also check out the Win32 code library 14831 there are some programs in there that could be converted to what you need. But again it depends on what you are doing you may not need to use both VB and Perl but only Perl.

Some good jump points for Win32 perl:

• Perl For Win32
• Roth Consulting

I think to sum up my ramble, think of it the other way around. Don't use vb to call perl but use perl to access the vba applications. It sounds like you would want to explore Win32::OLE to do this.