For what it's worth, I stopped the hair-pulling with Windows and went with the Virtual Machine suggestion. I installed VirtualBox, downloaded an image of the latest Ubuntu LTS, and worked with what was familiar to me in getting it setup as a LAMP server. In retrospect, I should probably have just done it that way from the outset, but I had thought it would be more convenient for my friend running more natively on Windows. Now he does need to start VirtualBox, click on the "Start" button for the VM, and then navigate to the local address for that server in his browser--but it's really not that difficult.

One minor nuisance to me, that won't apply to him, was in having to switch the VM's network setting back and forth between "NAT" and "Host-only Adapter" in VirtualBox, the former allowing the Linux VM access to the internet, and the latter allowing the Windows platform access to the VM. He won't need the internet, so he won't be having to toggle the setting.

Regarding Dancer2, the option sounds really intriguing, but alas, I have never been able to comprehend OOP-style references, etc., and have had poor luck in the past with the "guess and check" method of trying to use someone's module for my code. If they don't give very clear code examples that help me over the threshold, I never get in at the door. For this simple reason, I generally avoid using many of the "latest and greatest and most-widely touted" modules out there. I never developed sufficient abstract reasoning for Algebra 2 in high school, either, so I presume it's the sort of mental block that won't easily be erased (I tried to take Algebra 2 twice, with two different teachers, and ended up dropping both times as I just couldn't grasp it). I've managed to work with things like $cgi->param('form_input'); in my code--for me that's simple enough; but much beyond that I don't even seem to understand the explanations provided in the documentation, and, try as I might, I never seem to know what syntax is required to utilize some of these modules' features.