Does XAMPP install a c compiler? The reason I ask is that I would suggest going for Strawberry Perl since I have used it for quite some time (for both business and personal use) with no problems. Being able to use CPAN on windows is a great thing, even if you are just starting out. Installing Strawberry Perl is painless.

I think that using the Strawberry Perl installer and installing/configuring Apache would be worth the extra effort since, had the user never installed/configured Apache my themselves (by this I mean configure httpd.conf etc themselves) then IMHO it is good to know how to do this sort of thing.

N.B. for further information about Perl on the Windows platform see http://win32.perl.org

Martin