I don't see a 'community' version of 5.24 being available on the ActiveState downloads page. Perhaps paying customers get access to different versions. Perhaps of interest Strawberry Perl offers 32 and 64bit builds.

I suspect that: Your perl524.exe should need perl524.dll, which means you have an extra ancient Perl 5.8 perl.exe hidden somewhere (without it's perl58.dll in that same directory). This ancient perl's PATH is BEFORE the new installation (which has appended itself to the end of the PATH)

What I want you to do is drop to the CMD, and from there call perl -v. What happens? call perl524 -v. What happens?

I have 5.24 StrawberryPerl on my windows. The minimal perl installation is perl.exe (an identical copy of perl524.exe) and perl524.dll (or at least, was a few years ago) and does not require modules (*.pm and others) note that Strawberry perl also needs 3 gcc related dlls, but I do not have an AS-Perl around now, so that might also be required for AS-Perl.

So we drop to the CMD and run: where perl.exe

This will give you a path where perl.exe is located. If not, then your Perl is not in your PATH and you need to set it first. (then try again)

Great. Now create an empty directory and go into it:

md TEST
cd TEST
[download]

Now empty the PATH variable by doing a set PATH=. You can now run "perl" and it will not find that executable. and copy the perl.exe over: copy C:\SOMEPATH\perl.exe

now run perl again: perl.exe

it will tell you it needs a DLL, it should be in the same directory as the perl.exe was. Copy them over (lazy, in one go) copy C:\SOMEPATH\*.dll C:

now try again. Does it come up with version information or pupup/crashes? If you get version information, the binaries are not corrupt (for example: could be a virus that slowly encrypts things, although those virus leave DLL's alone and hunt for office documents and images).

Once you give us more information, we will know what's the problem.