There's good stuff in the Tutorials on installing modules (and specifically in Win32 with ppm)

the spaces should be fine with those regex checks you had.. after seeing the other posts i too think it was the cloberring of ping.txt that made it appear to have no data.. A debugging print statement in there by the regex check may still be a good idea (if in there orginally, it would have pointed in the direction of the clobbering because you'd see that the print wasn't being reached).