In case anyone reads this these days, setting "Blocking => 0" works in Win32 now. I found this out after reading complaints that it doesn't and not even trying it myself. It works for me. Here's some sample code of what I'm doing with it:

use IO::Socket::INET;
my $server = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr => '127.0.0.1',
                                   PeerPort => 12345,
                                   Proto    => 'tcp',
                                   Blocking => 0);

  my $buf;
  while (sysread($server, $buf, 1024))
  {
    $servdata .= $buf;
    print STDERR qq(READ.\n);
  }
  print STDERR qq(END READING FROM SERVER...\n);
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I'm doing more with it, of course, but that's the key parts. I hope it works for everyone else out there. I'm curious to hear if it doesn't.

BTW, I'm using this in ActivePerl 5.10 and PerlTray 7.3.0