Taking ActiveState on board is probably a good idea as suggested by apprentice. What flavour of Windows perl are you running? If it's an old version, I recommend slinging it and downloading pre-built perl 5.6.1 from ActiveState. This comes with the PPM installer.

Incidentally, do you have a C (or C++) compiler? This would be V. useful if you are looking at installing many CPAN extensions. My experience is that ActiveState PPM is limited in its range of modules - especially as new ones and new versions are coming out on CPAN all the time.

C++ 6.0 comes with nmake, which actually works and builds perl extensions. Though you may encounter problems with paths and library lists - I certainly did.

Best of luck with your extension building

-- rW