I'm not clear what you mean by "WinXP" when you report the filesize. Is it possible that the file has one or more Additional Data Streams? Notepad can add an ADS, for example. These are not detected in the normal way, but it does depend on how you are measuring it. Perl -s, like most utilities, only reports the size of the primary $DATA stream. You mention dir in one of the posts, that does not show ADS files either. See Win32::StreamNames