First of all I hope you know that you can reinstall Perl quite easily with the customized version written to your own home directory.

Secondly at a guess your problem on install was using the CPAN module. While nice, it unfortunately routinely uses at least 16 MB on my machine. However downloading and installing modules manually should work just fine. And if all else fails, you can install them elsewhere then just copy them over. (Works for pure Perl modules quite well. Compiled ones, not always so.)