I have installed this version of Activestate Perl on windows XP, and suffered a similar problem. About two weeks later after much fustration I completely uninstalled perl (everything but the scripts I had written), rebooted, and started from scratch (redownloaded the MSI from activestate,and reinstalled). This seemed to have fixed my problem.

I know that I have installed this version of perl on Win95, Win98, and Win98SE as well on different machines at work and have not suffered any problems other than the one XP thing, though at the moment I cannot say if I have tested the ppm thing on all of them or not (can't remember). Have you installed the latest Microsoft Installer? Not that I think it will install without it.

Best of Luck, I know how fustrating Windows Application Installations can be sometimes.

-Enlil