Oddity with 5.12.2 and file associations

I have been using Strawberry perl for over 18 months and installed v5.10.x
on many Windows Vista 32-bit systems without any problems.
After installing perl, I run a windows command script that sets the file
association for .pl files and invokes CPAN to install required modules.
Unfortunately, I installed v5.12.2.0 on a Windows Vista 32-bit system, and
used the same script, but something about the file association isn't working
properly.
The system acts as if I omitted the %* at the end of ftype.

If I open a Command prompt, the association looks fine...
C:\User\Machine>assoc .pl
.pl=Perl
C:\User\Machine>ftype Perl
Perl="C:\strawberry\per\bin\perl.exe" "%1" %*

Now if I invoke the snippet.pl script found at the bottom of this message, I
get the following results:
C:\User\Machine>snippet.pl xx yy
ARGV count = 0

C:\User\Machine>perl snippet.pl xx yy
ARGV count = 2
  "xx"
  "yy"


Any thoughts on how to resolve this ?


##----------------------------------------------------------------------
## snippet.pl
##----------------------------------------------------------------------
use strict;
use warnings;

my $count = scalar(@ARGV);
print qq{ARGV count = $count\n};
print qq{  "}, join(qq{"\n  "}, @ARGV), qq{"\n} if ($count);

__END__
##----------------------------------------------------------------------