I've found a temporty work-around. But I'd like to
share my experience and get better solutions:

Problem: The ActivePerl CGI works fine on Win2K/IIS,
but it cannot execute a 300KB .exe WinXP/IIS. BTW, it
can run perfectly as a standalone program from
command-line on both XP and 2K. The .pl looks like:

...
$res=system("c:/xyz/abc.exe m n");
...

The .exe can't be started at all (I added some file
logging to it and it wrote nothing to the log). 

Common methods tried: file security setting, Windows
registry change, alternative invocation methods ( ``,
exec), etc. They couldn't fix the problem.

Weirdly enough, the symptoms are related to two
things:

1. The size of .exe file. After reducing the code of
the program (basically making it an empty program
doing nothing), it can be executed on WinXP/IIS.

2. The user ID of the client is critical. By default,
Windows will assign sth like IUSER_XXX to incoming
anonymous HTTP requests. If I change this default
setup to the real admin of the server machine
(entering the admin's id and password for the .pl
file's security setting in IIS manager in the
"Anonymous Access" section --- replace the IUSER_XXX).
The .exe can be invoked! That's my current
work-around. It's fine since the machine is within a
corporate Intranet and I need only change the setting
for the single .pl file only. 

So, my questions are: Why is it like this? Are there
any safer solutions? My only guess is that IIS will
allocate different size of memory to the perl process
depending on the assigned ID of the CGI requester.
IUSER_XXX will get less.



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