I suspect something is awry with your setup

Yes - there's some weird stuff going on there.
I've just noticed that the ld.exe that's being executed is the one that's in strawberry/c/x86_64-w64-mingw32/bin (even though that location is usually NOT present in the path) instead of the usual strawberry/c/bin/ld.exe.

And, if ld.exe is being accessed as //k030/HydPrime/cnd/hyd/src/strawberry.5.38/c/x86_64-w64-mingw32/bin/ld.exe then I'm not sure what $Config{libpth} needs to look like.

Cheers,
Rob