Extracting WQL "count" results

rod has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I use Perl to interrogate our SMS database via WMI quite a bit. On this occasion, I want to extract the count of items in a table but can't get Perl to reveal the results! We start with the normal connection to WMI...

# Connect to WMI on reporting server
#
my $SWbemLocator = Win32::OLE->new("WbemScripting.SWbemLocator") or 
        FatalCOMError("Can't open WbemScripting object");
my $SWbemServices = $SWbemLocator->ConnectServer($Server, "root/sms/si
+te_$SiteCode") or 
        FatalCOMError("Can't connect to server: $Server");
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If I then submit a "straight" query...

    # Get count of clients in collection
    my $WQL = q/select * from SMS_CM_RES_COLL_CEN01562/;
    $Colln = $SWbemServices->ExecQuery($WQL,"WQL",16) or FatalErr("Exe
+cQuery for Clients failed",1);
    $count = $Colln->{Count};
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...$count contains the count of items in the collection. Unfortunately, on a large collection, this can be a bit slow. Ideally, I'd use the count(*) WQL command like so;

    # Get count of clients in collection
    my $WQL = q/select count(*) from SMS_CM_RES_COLL_CEN01562/;
    $Colln = $SWbemServices->ExecQuery($WQL,"WQL",16) or FatalErr("Exe
+cQuery for Clients failed",1);
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The problem that I have with this code is that, no matter what I try, I can't get to the actual result!

If I try the same query on WbemTest, I get a single-line answer that shows the correct answer. How do I get to it in Perl?

Can anyone help?

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