Thanks for the quick replies,
@corion, I'll look into plink, windowless putty will definitely be more convenient

@frieduck, correct me if I'm wrong, but that code allows SSHx to go through an existing proxy, but I need exactly the opposite - to use an established SSH connection as a SOCKS (or HTTP) proxy. I've looked at LWP::Protocol::socks, but I don't really even need a SOCKS proxy, HTTP is fine. Also, the reason why I spawn Putty is because I want to use several different tunnels (SSH sessions) at the same time.

@JavaFan, this is basically what I want, and its what I'm doing now, but with Putty rather than OpenSSH.

Really, my question is:
how can I emulate an ssh tunnel in Perl *WITHOUT* calling ssh or putty/plink?