PATH contains the location to your perl/bin directory

Yup. PATH=D:\Perl\bin

ScriptAlias looks something like: ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "C:/Path/To/Apache/cgi-bin/"

Yup: ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "D:/apache/cgi-bin/"

I'm using a hello world script so the code shouldn't be an issue, unless there is perhaps a switch or something different I should do in the shebang? (I've tried it with back and forward slashes, tried etc\perl as well as etc\perl.exe, and tried several variations on capitalizatoin in case that matters (capitalization as below matches the o/s):

#!D:\Perl\bin\perl
print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n";
print "hello, world!";

thanks much for your help, this thing is making me nuts!