Now I don't know whether to say "Thank you" first... or to give priority to the "Ouch!"

Nonetheless, your observation has to help point me to something odd about my setup.

BTW, did you see BrowserUK's Re^5: Win7, ASSOCiation , and @ARGV? I suspect modifying his ref to Perl64 is another step to try... but I'm checking with him (and the 'morrass of technet, MS.com and other M$ docs').