Thanks for your help! You pointed me in the write direction! I had been messing around with Encode while investigating all this, but didn't try CP1251! With 1251 it all worked!

Excellent you might think, right? Well, in my original question I tried to simplify my situation by limiting myself to russian. I didn't mention the other 15 languages I had to support (on their native NT istallations).

However, knowing I could do this with 1251, I looked in my c++ application's code pages for the encoding each language was using. I then listed all the encodings that Encode supports. Low and behold all of them existed in there. So I created a function that polls the OS to see what language we are using, then encoded from utf-8 into the appropriate encoding for that language!

Perl is the glue that holds my life together... although sometimes I wish it wasn't quite so sticky! (actually, it was perl that made my solution possible, I wish internationization wasn't so sticky! :D)

Thanks again!