To start with your question: The correct form is use strict;

I can't verify what you're seeing on NT at the moment, but on Win98 I get this using ActiveState's port (Build 633):

1. use strict; works as expected and reports what it's supposed to.
2. use Strict; shows no errors indicating that Strict.pm cannot be found, but doesn't flag any non-strict code, so it is obivously not being hooked up.

This is a bug due to the fact that filenames under Windows are not case-sentitive: the file strict.pm can be found as Strict.pm. So when Perl goes looking for Strict.pm, strict.pm is found and loaded. However, the import sub will not be run (and the hints for the Perl parser don't get set) as would happen automatically if you use strict;.

— Arien

Edit: Abigail-II said most of this and said it faster...