Something about your description doesn't sound quite right. You say you've downloaded various .tar.gz files and you've edited the ppd files to read ...MSWin32.... I can only assume that you are using an Activestate distro on a Win32 machine and are trying to install a standard CPAN tarball. You can't do that. Go to Activestate download the appropriate .zip files, unzip them, and then use ppm. If you look closely the unzip process will create a tarball in a subdirectory and ppm will process it directly.

rdfield