Following that line of reasoning ... does Perl fail to start?   Specify a script-name and it will not run it?   Will not run at all?   If so, this suggests to me that this perl.exe (the one that you are encountering in your $PATH) is not, in fact, the expected version. I believe that you can right-click on an icon attached to the executable and get version-information from an info dialog. Does perl -V (uppercase-V) do anything at all? If you specify the complete file-path to the perl.exe that (you think) is the version you just installed, instead of relying on $PATH to search for it, what happens?   (I don’t think Windows has a which command ...?)

I do not think that an XS-module would cause Perl to fail to start altogether.   But it is common for an executable to be a stub-loader for a DLL, and maybe that’s what the Strawberry team did.   They would be very specific about versioning and undoubtedly would include the version in the DLL-file name, as here.

I would also search the file system for perl*.dll and note anything and everything that shows up.   Ditto perl.exe.   Something is not as you think it is, and you’re just chasing rabbits until you can see what is really the situation here.