Silly question: are you accessing Perl scripts through a webserver (that is, <samp>http://localhost/myscript.pl</samp>) or are you accessing them through Windows Explorer (<samp>C:\InetPub\wwwroot\myscript.pl</samp>)? It sounds like the latter.

It makes a world of difference. Windows explorer runs the Perl scripts as if they were run from a command shell. Your webserver runs them with the appropriate environment values set and querie parameters sent, filters the output, and sends it to the web browser.