The following is a bad thing and I know that there are security issues and others, but it's a way to work around your problem until you either got rid of Sophos or you got an update for it.

Create a little EXE file using any language other than perl (if you can't, I'm sure many people here - including me - will help you) which either runs perl.exe to start your program (I didn't use PAR myself until now, it may be able to start your program out of the PAR file or you may need to provide an extracted version) or launch a small Perl program which downloads your program from a secure, local web server and eval()s it.

Again: This is no good thing at all, it isn't a real solution, but most of the time, noone is interested, _why_ something isn't working. Even worst if your applications are company critical: They must run, even if there are some very negative issues for a short time.

PS: If you don't need the Windows API, maybe a (Windows or Java-Website-integrated) Telnet client would also do the job. Just set up or use a linux server which provides your applications one per port.