Ah! Thanks. I did manage to look up the error code and to my surprise Win32::OLE->Initialize() does exactly what I need. Win32::API is strong, but mysterious ju-ju. As for the whether NULL pointers should be 0 or undef, I agree the undef ought to work, but then the numeric 0 ought to as well. Since I don't understand how clever Win32::API is about the type conversions, so I erred on the side of explicit values.

Thanks again. My Win32-FU is mightily, er, stoppable. :-)