It seems plausible that this heavy-handed method run afoul of improved security mechanisms in Vista.
Yes, that seems plausible. However, I've just built the module (version 1.01) from source on Vista SP1 without any problems. All of the tests ran fine. I used build 1004 of ActivePerl and dmake/MinGW.
The fact that I'm using SP1 might be significant (unless the op has also installed SP1).