Actually, it is a problem under Win NT as well. But it is only a problem if you pass the file name on the command line to a program that will interpret the / as you have described. Many, many Win NT programs don't have this problem and even cmd.exe supports using / as a directory separator (but cmd.exe's built-in commands don't). But many (most?) programs from Micrsoft interpret / as a command-line option. If you don't pass the filename to an external command, then the / should always work.

Based on your wording, it sounds like the problem under Windows 2000 is similar. I haven't played with W2K, so I'd appreciate some clarification.

Note that there are at least two places in the Win32 API where / can't be used in place of \: Registry calls and DefineDosDevice().

Update: ...and for the first case, that is why we have Win32::TieRegistry::Delimiter("/").

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")