Agreed, agreed.
I have a comment on the Win98SE question. Please don't -- me; I'm not recommending it, just trying to help.
I've spent a bit of time working with Win98SE, Linux, BSD and MAC OS (MacPerl) platforms, and I have used perl CGI scripts on all of them, and moved them from one to another with almost no changes required. Portability, thy name is Perl.
On Win98SE it's a matter of adding the Personal Web Server, and doing some things to get it to do CGI. The security is, as far as I can tell, nonexistent, but it's an okay platform for goofing around and learning a bit about CGI. I would NOT open it to the Internet, and I wouldn't use it for a production server, by any means. (For production, Apache, mod_perl... others can make much better recommendations than I can.)
Here's a page which google gave me... which describes how to get PWS to run Perl scripts as CGI programs. It involves registry editing, so take care. Having said that, if you're careful, it's not rocket science.

http://www.taltech.com/TALtech_web/support/bcax/Installing%20Perl%20Scripting.html

Personally, I hope you can use a different platform, but anyway, I hope this note helps.