In my experience forking on windows can lead to some unusual behavior. Based on what I've found from the internet and others have pointed out, fork() doesn't work like we'd expect it to on *NIX.

To accomplish what I wanted, I've put aside fork and used Win32::Process, threads, and system(). I've looked into POE (which is great). However, some of the modules required (the ones I've needed of course) do not install with ActiveState.

Hope this helps