A few questions for clarification:

• Which Windows 8? (RT vs. Pro, 32 vs. 64 bit)
• Which Perl? Okay, you already mentioned Strawberry and ActivePerl. Which version of Perl? (5.16? 5.14? 5.003?)
• How have you confirmed that Perl installation fails? (perl --version from PowerShell, writing and double clicking a script, ...?)

For what it's worth, I have ActivePerl 5.16 happily installed on a Windows 8 Pro partition at home. All I did was run the installer. I needed to log out and back in before the path changes were applied, but once I did that perl --version in PowerShell gave me the expected response.