First off, welcome to The Monastery.   8^)

If you already have *nix experience, or are interested in gaining some, then I'd encourage you to give Cygwin a try.   It's really quite slick - I've had good luck with it for cross-platform perling from a win32 box, although ymmv.   Since it's a layer on top of win32, I wouldn't expect you to have problems with the winmodem or pppoe dsl.

If nothing else, you gain *nix commandline tools like less and grep from your win32 cmd.exe shell.
    cheers,
    Don
    striving toward Perl Adept
    (it's pronounced "why-bick")