Are the Strawberry perl dirs at the front of the path?

If you've installed Strawberry Perl from the .msi installer, then the answer is "no". This is something that has created problems in the past
AFAIK, that installer always places the Strawberry perl dirs at the end of the path.
This makes it tricky if you have multiple perls and/or multiple anything-that-is-included-in-strawberry/c/bin.

It makes far better sense to run a portableshell.bat (or similar) which puts everything at the beginning of the PATH.
That way, even if there is another compiler (or whatever) in the PATH, perl is still using the one that it's meant to use.

I go one step further and make sure that there is no perl or C compiler in my PATH, until I run a batch script (eg portableshell.bat) that places the perl/compiler combination of my choice at the start of the PATH.

Cheers,
Rob