If all you really want it's to *check* the connection status, I'd avoid using such an approach because it's slow and auto-vivifying (Windows tries to activate each connection you want to read from).

IMHO a better way would be to query the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) infrastructure through DBD::WMI:

use strict;
use warnings;
use DBI;

my $dbh = DBI->connect('dbi:WMI:');

my $sth = $dbh->prepare(<<'WQL');
  SELECT * FROM Win32_NetworkConnection
  WHERE ConnectionState != 'Connected'
WQL

$sth->execute() or die $dbh->errstr;
while (my ($con) = $sth->fetchrow_array) {
    printf "%s\t%s\n", $con->ConnectionState, $con->Name;
}
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