I apologise for necro'ing this thread but for the benefit of those that come after, here is the "proper" way to disable the HTML docs in ActivePerl:

You can also get a list of all the ppm configuration options with the following command:

C:\Users\DEV>ppm config list

    ppm config *name* [ *value* ]
        Get or set various PPM configuration values.

        The following configuration options might be of interest:

        arch
            The architecture of the current database. For internal use
+.
            Don't change this.

        repo_dbimage
            If set to '1' look for package.db.gz indexes in repositori
+es
            before looking for the package.xml file.

        install_html
            If set to '0' don't generate and install the HTML version 
+of the
            documentation for the modules installed. This makes instal
+lation
            considerably faster.

        gui.*
            Various settings for the graphical user interface.

    ppm config list
        List all configuration options currently set.
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