in reply to "use open" fails in perl 5.20?

Using portable Strawberry Perl 5.20.2.1 (32-bit) on a Windows system, I was able to run the following without any issues.

perl -e "use open \":encoding(utf8)\";"

If it's not a Perl 5.20.2 issue, it could be that the person's path variables (@INC, etc.) may have gotten messed up during the OS upgrade.