You are going to have to supply some additional context (ie. code:) if you are going to get further help with this.

The following snippet taken almost verbatim from the Net::Ping pod seems to work ok under AS 5.8 on my NT4/sp6a system. Perhaps you could try it on your W2k system and see what the result is.

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use Net::Ping;
use Time::HiRes;

my $host = 'bbc.co.uk';
my $p = Net::Ping->new('tcp');
$p->{portnum} = 80;
$p->hires();
my ($ret, $duration, $ip) = $p->ping($host);
printf("$ret:$host [ip: $ip] is alive (packet return time: %.2f ms)\n"
+, 1000 * $duration);
$p->close();
__END__
D:\Perl\test>245918
About to fork

1:bbc.co.uk [ip: 132.185.132.204] is alive (packet return time: 4907.0
+6 ms)

D:\Perl\test>
[download]

Note: The 'About to fork' is a line I added to my copy of Net::Ping.pm just before the line that is giving your error to ensure that I am exercising the same code path as you.