Hi,

As I understand from ActiveState, the underlying reason is that the .exe uses Windows (8.1) dynamic loading for any dependent libraries.

I have no idea whether that's correct.
A bit more info on what's happening there might help.

You could also try:
ppm install http://www.sisyphusion.tk/ppm/Net-SSH2.ppd --force

That should install a Net-SSH2-0.53 that was built against static libs. It also installs a couple of dll's that need to be loaded at runtime, and it might be that those 2 dll's need to be explicitly loaded into the app. (You should find them in your $Config{sitebin}.)

As to the actual error that's killing your build it seems that both your perl and your mingw have decided to independently prototype a function named "mkstemp".
None of my mingw versions of stdlib.h contain such a function, but your mingw stdlib.h apparently does. (I don't have a mingw.org build of 4.8.1.)

I don't know how one is supposed to correctly deal with this, but both versions take a char* arg and return an int.
I would therefore try commenting out the prototype in either stdlib.h or win32.h, then run 'dmake', and then reinstate the removed the prototype after the build has finished.

This is a problem that should arise for every perl extension that you attempt to build, and has nothing particularly to do with Net::SSH2.

Cheers,
Rob