Thanks.

I'm going to take a look at that module and see if it works for what I need. Using loopback and sockets had not occurred to me.

It's not the socket blocking I'm worried about, but the PIPE I was using from open2. I guessed that the problem was that select in windows only works on sockets, but you can supposedly use WaitForMultipleObjectEx and some of the other winsock functionality to create a select that actually works on any signalable object. I've even been considering writing a module to that effect in C.