Thanks a lot for the offer though. I wonder, but don't have enough insentive at this stage to research it, how hard it would be to create a module that would reliably work cross platform?

Well - I don't actually have a Win32 box that I could develop/test this on. And I personally don't have a use for such a module - I did this to illustrate that XS isn't very difficult for simple access to C routines (it can get hairy if you need to really access the perl guts, but that's another story.)

Michael