A little clarification about Active State modules. Type "ppm" at the command line. That will launch a nice GUI that links to Active State's main repository. Although there are 15,000 modules in that thing, that is just a subset of the CPAN universe. Sometimes you can find other pre-built modules on the net if something isn't in the main AS repository. I did that for the table-matrix Tk widget.

I use Textpad as my program editor for Perl dev. I think Notepad++ has similar features. I have a single button that saves all open files, runs active window and captures STDOUT to another editor screen. I've written a lot of code with this simple arrangement.

Update: I just ran ppm on my machine and there are 20,078 packages for my AS Perl version (5.20) in there ( more than the 15,000 I mentioned). That is not "everything on CPAN", but this is a non-trivial subset. Also HTML documentation is generated for every installed package. Go to START|Programs|ActiveState|documentation to launch the doc tool in your browser. This can be very helpful.