I think you may be onto a loser trying to combine Perl threads and COM (Win32::OLE), unless this has been improved recently. See this article on the ActiveState Win32 mailing list (the post is over a year old - things have moved on a tad since - but the error shown matched the one I received). Dispite this, using fork as shown by Plankton in the earlier example does appear to work for me (i.e. it executes both subs, which is odd, since fork on win32 is implemented with threads...).

my $pid;
 
if( $pid = fork ) {
        check_1();
} elsif ( defined $pid ) {
        check_2();
}
[download]

Hope the mailing list reference helps.

$q=[split+qr,,,q,~swmi,.$,],+s.$.Em~w^,,.,s,.,$&&$$q[pos],eg,print