Ok, you confused me. I'm not sure I understand the 'deiconify' part, as I've written numerous apps that start up fine and not as an icon by default. Usually my apps look something like this, but never exhibit iconify problems:

   my $win = MainWindow->new;
   $win->configure(-title =>'hi',-background=>'blue');
   $win->geometry('+225+150');  # offset from top left
   $win->minsize(575,375); # no smaller than this
   $win->maxsize(575,375); # no larger than this
   # add widgets
   ...
   MainLoop();
[download]

Slightly off-topic: Note that since I want a window that doesn't change size, I don't have to supply the initial width and height to the 'geometry' method. I should, yes, but three calls in a row to control sizes didn't seem quite so elegant. Still, I have two calls, and that seems to be one too many. Can dictating a non-resizable window of dimensions $x and $y be made in a single call?

As one last follow up: Mastering Perl/Tk by O'Reilly (the Emu book) is a *really* good book. If you can get your work to pay for this, that would be a good thing to do, if not, buy it anyway. I use it all the time and it is really well written. GUI programming books are rarely this easy to read, and this one has tons of content.