Thanks Dave. I'm still very noobish to Perl, so I have a question on your response. the $_->join for threads->list, what does this do. The problem we are having, is that are services have a delay in their response time, being that our farthest host is between 200-400 miles from our distribution. Is this command going to keep the threads alive until a response if found? The reason for the multi threads is that the main thread, launches a method that is launching other threads to search for all of the servies on each host. So,

foreach $host(@syshosts)
{
   @sysThread = threads->new( \&findHostNodes, $host );
}

sub findHostNodes
{
  my $host = @_;

  #print some stuff about the node

  #now find the services on the host
  foreach $service (@r21services)
  {
    @serviceThread = threads->new(\@shutdonwServices, 
                                   $service);  
  }
}

sub shutdownServices
{
   shut down the windows services we are looking for
}
[download]

From you response, in your opinion, what is the better method? Thanks, Jeff