We considered cygwin but it faces the same problems we have with perl.

• A. Architecture support - we haven't looked into it enough to know if the features we need work fine on ia64 platforms. IE, does Win32::OLE work in cygwin on ia64?
• B. How do you deploy cygwin in an automated fashion with no user intervention. We already almost have this working for perl (again windows is the long pole)
• C. We still need to automagically download and install perl modules. Granted this will be much easier since we're in a unix like environment.