Some info about what distro of perl you have installed would be helpful.

FYI, On my machine, if I did "perl simple.pl" I saw the dir listing. However, if I did "simple.pl" I got nothing, and eventually the windows "file association applet" appeared, asking me how to associate this command with a known application.

I'm guessing if you dig a bit into the docs for your distro, you will find out how they set up this file association, and perhaps give you a clue how to fix it. I see the DOS commands "ftype" and "assoc" may also be helpful in tracking this down.

Naturally, down deep, this is likely a Registry Thing, but hopefully you won't have to dig that far to fix this.

--b