++ Again, many thanks for the effort you've put in on this: it is much appreciated.

The only Windows box I currently have available is an old laptop, which sits in its bag for most of the year, and only sees the light of day every few months or so: I'll probably end up using this for the initial (deployment) tests. It's running Strawberry Perl (v5.12), so good to know Image::LibRSVG works with that. And, although the laptop is now fairly ancient, it's probably about a similar vintage to Image::LibRSVG, so I don't foresee any issues in that area.

running Strawberry Perl (v5.12), so good to know Image::LibRSVG works with that

I was a little concerned that there might be problems with such an old version of Strawberry, but it works fine on my 32-bit Strawberry 5.12.2.
I was more concerned about the capability of that old ppm utility, but it did the job despite emitting some strange warnings.

Those early builds of Strawberry Perl don't have the sisyphusion repo in their list of repositories, so if you want to run:

ppm install Image-LibRSVG
or even:
ppm install http://www.sisyphusion.tk/ppm/Image-LibRSVG.ppd
[download]

then you'll need to add the sisyphusion repo to the list.
There's probably a command to do that, but I simply inserted:

<REPOSITORY LOCATION="http://www.sisyphusion.tk/ppm" NAME="Sisyphusion
+" SUMMARYFILE="searchsummary.ppm" />
[download]

just under the 2 existing "REPOSITORY LOCATION" entries in perl/vendor/lib/ppm.xml.

Alternatively you can just run through the dependencies as separate installs:

ppm install http://www.sisyphusion.tk/ppm/PPM-Sisyphusion.ppd
ppm install http://www.sisyphusion.tk/ppm/PPM-Sisyphusion-Glib_dll.ppd
ppm install http://www.sisyphusion.tk/ppm/PPM-Sisyphusion-Cairo_dll.pp
+d
ppm install http://www.sisyphusion.tk/ppm/PPM-Sisyphusion-Pango_dll.pp
+d
ppm install http://www.sisyphusion.tk/ppm/PPM-Sisyphusion-Gtk2_dll.ppd
ppm install http://www.sisyphusion.tk/ppm/PPM-Sisyphusion-Image_LibRSV
+G_dll.ppd
ppm install http://www.sisyphusion.tk/ppm/Image-LibRSVG.ppd
[download]

(Of course, you might find a more appealing solution before you ever get to try this ppm package out. That wouldn't upset me in any way at all.)

Cheers,
Rob

That's excellent! Again, a huge amount of thanks. I only wish I could give you more upvotes.

After looking at all the other suggestions, and taking my own investigations into account, I think I'm pretty much sold on Image::LibRSVG for this project.

— Ken