Let me try to clarify the overall view of what I'm trying to do. I have a GUI interface written in AHK (www.autohotkey.com), where users can select a category (node) to search by, and enter a search value. They hit go, and the Perl script is called with two arguments, the node to search and the value to look for. The cmd console window is suppressed, and the content that would be written to STDOUT is piped to an edit control in the GUI. The user is able to stop the script if a match is found by effectively killing the perl.exe Windows process.

Is XML::Twig even the best approach for this problem? I want this to run quickly and not use a ton of system resources.