what is your suggestion of doing it otherwise ?

Using the "wide" API directly, of course. As long as Perl is compiled as an ANSI application, the only way to do so is to write a module, either using XS or Win32::API. Perl can handle Unicode, the only annoyance is that Perl currently uses a different encoding than Windows, so each and every wrapper function that passes strings from and to Windows needs to convert the strings. DBD::ODBC is an example for this; compiled on Windows, it prefers the "wide" API for ODBC, unless explicitly disabled.

Alexander