Cygwin, perl, or visual basic?

[Joel Hammer]

I have a little project here at work. We have finally, after months delay,
gotten our digital cameras installed. The images look great. 

One of the issues is going to manipulating the images.

At least one of the computers involved is windows 2000. I need to arrange a
way to move images around this thing automatically, name them, put comments
into them, resize them, and so on. I am very grateful imagemagick has a
windows port. I hope it works on 2000.

However, for the various scripting tasks, I am unsure how  to
proceed. I have never used cygwin. Does that provide a powerful enuf
linux environment to do this sort of thing?   Would just using perl be
enuf for simple scripts? Does perl have sufficient scripting capability
in windows for this sort of thing?

Visual basic seems like overkill for what I need to do, but that would
be one microsoft alternative. 

Any ideas appreciated,

Joel