An alternative to pslist would be wmic, which comes with Windows (at least from XP and up). However, I wanted to avoid a solution where I had to shell out for this, because it means that I need to filter out the PIDs for the pslist/wmic process (and, perhaps, an interim command shell process).

I wanted to avoid Win32::Process::Info too, because of the many problems pointed out in its documentation, but after all, this was the solution I ended up with, because the alternatives were even less attractive.

Actually, I personally would prefer upgrading Perl to a version where kill works as documented, but this is not feasible at the moment...