Well, I've never had problems with ConTEXT on Windows, so I give it the thumbs up.

You can assign F9-F12 to whatever you like: Running perl programs with or without "-c" or "-d:ptkdb", as the previous poster said. And you can assign "hot-key" macros to print out bits of code you type often ("use strict/warnings;" or to provide a module template*).

ConTEXT works with plenty of languages too, so will highlight your C/HTML/Python/SQL/CSS files nicely too. It's nice and fast, I always feel as if IDEs for perl (tried Komodo, Oasis, and several others a while ago) are slowing me down but maybe I have to look at them again (it's been a while since I looked).

I didn't find all these things in Notepad++. Zeus looks interesting though, has some IDE-like things that ConTEXT doesn't have, lists of classes files, a workspace window.

* and yes I know module-starter and h2xs will do that on the command line ..:)