Given you've already said:

"literally copy paste from source links on CPAN web pages into an editor and write them to my Perl install..."

above, you're already bypassing whatever foolish security restrictions you've got in place anyways, so do yourself a favour, from home, fetch all the modules you need and put them on a thumb drive (or just do the packaging at home or another location).

Better yet, set up a CPAN::Mini on a thumb drive or laptop, then copy the whole shebang to your dev box, which you can then periodically update in the same manner.

Beats copying manually by hand as you've said.

Note that I'm not advising you bypass security if it means trouble. I'm just pointing out other options if you're going to get the exact same data in a much more manual, PITA method anyhow.

On reflection, my working hypothesis to achieve nirvana and a future proof toolchain to an EXE is to:

* Install Strawberry Perl from our locally maintained distribution

* Use the method described in http://digitalcrunch.com/perl/how-to-use-par-with-strawberry-perl/, and work with appropriate teams to grab the 5 tarballs.

Being a total novice to this sort of thing, I've no clue if 'dmake' somehow arrives with Strawberry Perl, or if there is some other dependency I need to satisfy, or even if it will run at all on my local machine ...

Yes, dmake and the gcc compatible with the Strawberry Perl distribution are included with Strawberry Perl.

So, instead of downloading, copy each file of a distribution into your editor and save it from there.