On one PC at home, I have Perl for both Windows (Strawberry) and Cygwin and I don't think that I ever had any such problems, and I don't see it very likely, but it might happen sometimes, who knows? At least the symptoms you are reporting (with Unix path types) give the impression that it could be something like this.

Update: I had not seen your answer saying that you are also running Cygwin when I wrote this post asking the question. I was disturbed by a phone call when writing this and I did not think about refreshing the thread before posting. Sorry for asking somewhat obsolete questions.

I must concur with those pointing the finger at Cygwin. On every box on which I've had Cygwin Perl and another, ActiveState, Strawberry, what-have-you, I've ended up with strangely intermixed Perls. The problem usually (seems to) begin with CPAN working directories being conflated.

Good luck. Please keep us posted if you find a solution.

Do some diagnostics

perl -V > perl-V-before-when-its-good.txt

perl -V > perl-V-after-when-its-bad.txt

Share that information with us, compare that information, trace down the culprit that is setting those %ENV vars, then clear them

Hello karlgoethebier,

As others have said, it looks like a conflict between your Cygwin and Strawberry Perls. If so, why not switch to a portable edition of the latter? See http://strawberryperl.com/releases.html. I’ve always found the “PortableZIP editions” to be excellent.

You fire up your portable edition from a command prompt via portableshell.bat, and the environment variables, etc., are automatically set to their correct values for this particular Perl version. You can run multiple versions on your system in this way without any problems — in parallel, if you like, with no conflicts.

Just a thought,

You are using Strawberry Perl on Windows XP with *nix-style paths in @INC?

No, not really. I'm not using it with *nix-style paths in @INC.

But 'after a while' i get *nix-style paths in @INC.

I noticed it first after firing up my emacs shortcut for shell-comand-on-region for perltidy and emacs told me that something went wrong.

Examining @INC the usual way (like perl -E 'say for @INC;') shows these *nix-style paths.

Well, i have also cygwin installed on my box. But i run Strawberry Perl from cmd.

Best regards, Karl

«The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe»

i have also cygwin installed on my box.

That is almost certainly the source of your problem. Somehow your two perl installs are interacting.

I don't have any details for you -- I gave up on cygwin within days of the first time I installed it 12+ years ago -- but that's where you need to look.

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Examining @INC the usual way (like perl -E 'say for @INC;') shows these *nix-style paths

This would almost certainly indicate that the PATH environment variable is currently set such that the first perl.exe to be located is Cygwin's, not Strawberry's.
Next time this happens, run PATH to see what that environment variable actually contains ... and then try to work out why it changed.

Cheers,
Rob