most cost effective solution in money and manhours.....the bundled "APP" turned out to be 3.5MB!

So you want fast and easy to develop with a miniscule binary I suppose? Sadly this won't happen. The perl binary itself is at least 650K. The basic Tk dll is 450K so there is 1.1 MB (that won't compress) before you even draw breath. You can add at another 300K just for the associated source code of Dynaloader, Crypt, Tk, and Win32 which is now 1.4MB If you get the impression it is unlikely to fit on a floppy you are right but unless you *need* it to fit on a floppy why worry?