Personally I find this all a moderate touch amusing as I have long argued that Win32 perl is less than it should be because core perl just doesnt support enough of the Windows API to work around the fact that Windows doesnt behave like UNIX.

I agree.

If strawberry perl is what is required to get enough of a consensus on this particular issue that we actually see some better Win32 API support in core then ill be happy.

I was basically asking "Is will acheive that"?

You mention elsewhere that MinGW isn't compatible with VC++v8. When I went looking for the fabled "free MS compiler", this was the one I found. Is v7 also available?. I still use v6, but if v8 is the only free one available, then maybe the discussion above about making Perl compile with that is also a valid area of discussion.