I know that it's supposed to be but it's not necessarily the same perl. I downloaded and installed it about a year (or year and a half) ago to see what all was different. My guess is that it doesn't set all of the necessary registry settings that the MSI sets. Once it was "installed", there were lots of things that didn't work; one of which was PPM. I know there were other pieces that didn't work either but the moment I can't recall. It's just been too long. This was on a Win98 machine so that might have had something to do with it too.