I don't suppose you have acces to Visual Studio 6, do you? I have been able to compile perl 5.8 with Visual Studio 6 C++ using normal nmake on Windows 2000.

I haven't as yet had much luck building stuff with mingw. I am using mingw with gcc version 3.2. What version gcc (with mingw) do you have? To find out type gcc -v or gcc --version.