Can you just make your application a daemon (windows service) and have it "interact with the desktop" by creating GUI's ? This would probably require ActiveState tools or you would have to compile a .exe file that invoked the Perl application in order to get the "interact with the desktop" rights and such. Meanwhile, I really think you might be able to profile the code, look over your design, and make it lighter weight without going to those extremes. I have Perl/Tk apps that start up pretty quickly, but they are also rather small so maybe that's not fair.