Thinks: The Perl Win32:: modules have code in them to start and stop services. I'd have to look through them to be sure, but I'd imagine there's a facility in there to be able to specify which machine you wanted to perform this on (not just local). And I'm pretty sure they're portable to non-Win32 systems. Have a look at those...

I suppose they might rely on running on a Windows machine in order to access the Win32 API. Maybe the details of the Win32 RPC protocol hasn't been fully reverse engineered^dbdbscrutinised. Maybe the Perl modules are just front-ends to binary backends which can only run on a Win32 machine. None of these would surprise me given Microsoft's stinginess with publishing standards (and record for disobeying its own). So it's probably 50/50.

Just a thought,

Paul