What is the data from the COM object supposed to look like? Are you certain it is 7-bit ASCII with no bytes with the high bit set? In other words, with no extended characters in it.

Perl is almost certainly not converting to "7-bit even parity" because it doesn't know about any such thing. The only place I have seen "even parity" used is with modems. Not to mention that the string you presented is not even partity.

That string is not in UTF-8 but it is still likely an encoding issue. Win32::OLE does have an option to set the code page for translating Unicode strings to Perl strings. You might want to check its value or explicitly set it the code page.