There are a couple options. I've listed them in my order of my personal preference.

1. Use Windows Task Scheduler instead
2. Sleep for shorter period of time (implement a more intelligent scheduling algorithm)
3. Disable safe signal handling. From perlipc:
   

   If you want the old signal behaviour back regardless of possible memory corruption, set the environment variable PERL_SIGNALS to "unsafe" (a new feature since Perl 5.8.1).