Try perl -v and perl -V out to find out what kind of Perl you have. From the "missing $" error I suspect that it is from an earlier version of Perl than your modules.

Also try:

perl -e 'print map qq($_\n), @INC'
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(use " instead of ' if you are on Windows) to see what Perl thinks its search path for modules is. The fact that you don't have any strict.pm available suggests that Perl's library is misplaced. (Can easily happen if someone mounted Perl on a network drive...) If you know where the modules are supposed to be, one hack to get your scripts to work is to put this at the start of your script:

BEGIN{ push @INC, "/path/to/modules"; }
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This is kind of like a use lib, except that Perl doesn't need to know where lib is to get it to work. :-)

Alternately you could just save yourself the headache and reinstall Perl.