I want to add, dragon', that security holes are invented by programmers, not network sockets or the programmers who use them.

If you're talking about the Windows Scripting Host solution offered above, then realize that WSH is probably a bigger security hole than IIS is. It doesn't matter if it's hosting Perl or VB code. The poor seperation of user privileges that is common in Win32 environments means that just having it on is a problem.

This is a highly unfortunate situation. The WinNT permission model is far superior to the classical Unix model, but applications and sysadmins don't make good use of it. Many, perhaps most, security problems on Win32 would go away if its access controls were used fully.