It's hard to tell if you're doing something wrong without seeing your code. Here's an example I just threw together that works. Note - this is on a windows 2000 box, so issues with being suid root aren't something I take into consideration.

use strict;
use warnings;
use Net::Ping;

my $p = Net::Ping->new('icmp', 1);
my $result = $p->ping('192.168.2.1');

print "Result is $result\n";
[download]

If you're still having problems, post your code so we can figure out where things might be going wrong.

Rich