The answer to the 2nd question is yes, but you have to pay for the full version of P2X, and use the "-gui" option. I've used it before quite successfully (even including a nice splash page while initing the rest of a large GUI app). I presume PerlApp supports the ability as well; I don't know about PAR/pp (there was some discussion a year or so ago wrt supporting splash pages, since PAR tends to take a *long* time to bootstrap/unbundle contents the first time you execute a bundled app, but I don't think splashes ever got implemented).