I wouldn't be surprised if waitVariable is broken... interps, and fileevent are broken under Win32, Steve Lidie confessed this to me via e-mail while I was reading "Mastering Perl/Tk" and having problems ... his examples (ie..tkComics) weren't working on Win32. I banged my head on this one for a long time about a year ago. Threads won't work as expected and fork blows up. As far as I know, POE is the only way to solve these types of issues. I am curious if pTk or the few other Perl/Gui's have solved these issues on Win32. Try posting to the perl.tk newsgroup brother monk.
JamesNC