When saying "service" i meant with the broad sense of the word. As a background, persistant proccess, that optionally starts up when the machine boots. This can be achieved by utilizing the native Windows Services API either via GUI or with the instsrv.exe commandline utility. That step would most likelly involve feeding the above utility with the full path to perl along with its commandline, the script you want run as a service. If this doesn't work out, you can try the standard All Users>Startup folder that initializes everything upon boot or placiong this in a login script. Plenty of options aside the obvious manual launching.

As for threads on Windows, things are pretty straing forward with recent versions of Perl. Just use Threads and then do something like $thread = threads->new($coderef,@data) after reading up the documentation.

Of course, certain data can be shared amongst threads, either by passing back and forth data between them, or keeping data on the parent and handing them down to worker threads, maintaining an index of what has been taken care of, and what is available for the next thread in line to take care of. I am not sure, but this i believe is the "Work Crew" threads model of operation.

The point in this approach is staying miles away from the wall, thus making impossible to hit. What you were proposing seems to me like speeding at 200MPH and pulling the brakes 50 meters from the wall. Excuse the somewhat not amusing analogy. :)