Up to now I haven't installed Perl on Win2000, but I have installed Perl (ActivePerl to be precise) on Win95, Win98, NT and WinME (all in German) successfully. I strongly doubt that it has anything to do with the language version.
With ActivePerl I have experienced delays of up to 10 Minutes while the installation routine created the html documentation. It was on a very slow machine, so this shouldn't happen on your AMD.
Still I can recommend built 5.6.0.623 or later. If you have troubles installing that, too, you should get in touch with ActiveStates support.

neophyte Niederrhein.pm