I take your point. But perl2exe does offer a -tiny option in the pro edition that allows you to strip out some of the dlls and distribute them separately, which is an advantage if there is more than a single program involved. The questions one needs to ask when considering perl2exe are:

1. Will the program be run on just the development machine or be distributed to other machines as well? If the latter, how much trouble is it going to be to do a full Perl install on the other machines?

2. How "upgrade resistant" is the program? This is to say, if you upgrade your Perl installation, will the program have to be tweaked to accomodate it? (This may be a big issue when Perl 6 comes along, and is always a concern when you are using third-party modules.) If so, perl2exe allows you to freeze a working version, giving you time to do the tweaking (or not) as you see fit.

Well, I guess my comments have taken us a bit afield of the original question! And once again, I probably sound like a shill for perl2exe. I'm not, but it does solve some problems for me that I don't mind sharing. :-)