Your use of fork and backticks in harness with a "sleep 10/kill 9 bandaid" just to launch a GUI process asynchronously is truly gut-wrenching. BrowserUk's advice of using the Win32 system(1, @args) trick is far superior and likely to be adequate for your purposes. Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware, this handy Win32 trick is documented only in perlport and so is not as well known as it should be.

For more Win32-specific control of processes, see the Win32::Process and Win32::Job modules.