note tye <blockquote><i> What options are there that will bring Windows into line with Linux ? </i></blockquote><p> Use cygwin Perl. </p><p> Win32 Perl's [doc://fork] creates a thread and then makes copies of the Perl interpreter. Copying the Perl interpreter does not make copies of non-Perl global data such as C globals or things loaded from *.dll files. </p><p> If you want to make a copy, then you need to use something tied to the Perl interpreter instance. You could use a Perl package variable (global), for instance. </p> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-22609"><p align="right"> - [tye]<tt> &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;</tt> </p></div></div> 929097 929097