Well to be honest, Win32 stuff is just not part of my world these days (hardly ever was), so I don't really have a clue what COM objects are or how they work. I just happened to recall that a number of MS-Win thingies do seem to use UTF-16LE natively for text data, and when their native data happens to go through some other process that normally doesn't use or expect UTF-16 encoding, you get strange behavior, including the sort of thing displayed in the OP.

Maybe the module author(s) involved should be consulted or alerted about this -- or maybe a closer reading of the relevant module man pages would help...

update: Having just looked at Win32::OLE, I would say (guessing again) that the solution lies in understanding what the "Logger" application really does, and making sense of the paragraph in the Win32::OLE man page that describes "Localization". It may be that there really is no problem at all with the perl app and module usage described in the OP -- the monk simply needs to use the appropriate (UTF-16-aware) methods for reading the Logger output.