I may be doing this a$$backwards, but simplified:
The page has a radio button set and labels with a submit button.
When the submit is clicked, the page is reloaded and the page checks to see which if any of the buttons was selected.
Based on this selection, a number of processes start and then a web application is launched (the IE part of this question).
So it's not a simple click on a hotlink. This may not be the best use of Perl/CGI, but the rest of the collection of pages that makes up this toolset does rely heavily on Perl and I want to be consistent.