I just noticed, the XS portion I converted to almost pure perl, is 2 8x11 pages long. The perl script is 8 8x11 pages long. Shows you that XS is so much faster, easier and better than trying this in Perl.

Well, at least 5 pages of that is CONSTANTS, and at least one page is , unexplained Win32::API overrides and C-style if/else block