Thanks, Courage. Several other notes seem to pity users of
system but they don't say what to do about it. I tried your method and my process does not get hung. There appear to be many interesting controls for
Win32::Process and I will examine some other places in my code where I'm not satisfied with how
system behaves.
In this particular case, I have opened a bug report and find that my problem is similar to another recently submitted bug and ActiveState is working on it. (?)
As for an alternative to Tk, people have said that my interface looks old-fashioned, 80's-ish, etc., and I wouldn't mind an alternative, but I'm pretty invested and will need to gain traction with my app before I can afford to make any big changes. :-)