I looked at the "context" stuff reciently, and the current version of ActiveState Perl automatically generates the normal @INC paths from the location of the main .exe you ran. It also looks in the registry, but you can leave it blank and do without--use @ENV only, which is easy to localize to a shell instance.

If the .dll files have different names (version number in the name), then again no big deal. If they have the same name but are different (like MS does with MFC) you can simply put the corresponding .dll in the same directory with the .exe and it's found there first.

To explore (or debug) the issues, download RegMon and FileMon from www.sysinternals.com and see what files and registry keys it actually uses at run-time.

I think it should be no big deal.

As for getting the desired version to run automatically on the command-line, use a batch file like "setperl xxy" or "setperl yyz" to switch which one is associated with .pl and .perl files. I do that with C++ versions by changing the PATH environment variable.

—John