in reply to cygwin or linux conundrum
You should find that nearly all Perl modules will build and install okay with ActiveState Perl. You will probably need to get hold of Microsoft's nmake.exe to do this, but it's free and easy to get hold off.
For the modules that have a c component, you can find the more common ones in one of the many PPM repositories. You should be able to find most modules compiled for you somewhere - though sometimes not the most recent version.
If you buy Microsoft Visual c/c++ you can compile your own modules from scratch and you should find that most of CPAN is then at your disposal.
With Cygwin you get Unix emulation layer for Windows, with a suite of very useful Unix tools that all work great from the bash or even cmd.exe prompt. I would say that if you have the space on a NT/2K box install Cygwin whatever you do....
Cygwin Perl is great, and allows you to run Perl almost as if it were on a real Unix system. It's is not perfect, but it is pretty good. It is a tad bit slower because of the emulation layer, but overall it's a very good alternative.
I too have the problem of a Winmodem on one my main system, but found a re-built scrap system more than adequate as a Linux environment. When I get my next system, it will be a Linux only box.....
Some useful past nodes:
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