It's convinced it's still running for some reason...

So you get a message similar to the below?

D:\Perl>perl -MCPAN -e shell;

There seems to be running another CPAN process (1972). Contacting...
Other job is running.
You may want to kill it and delete the lockfile, maybe. On UNIX try:
    kill 1972
    rm D:\Home\.cpan\.lock
D:\Perl>
[download]

Try finding the cpan lockfile and deleting it. (your message may not have shown the actual address. Hunt it down and kill it!)

You didn't really say if you had uninstalled the old perl or not. I believe that in some situations this can be important. A bit more information might lead me to make more useful suggestions. :-) Like did you have to reconfigure cpan after install? did you install over an old one? are you trying to reuse the site/lib?

As a seperate thought what happens when you download a distribution from search.cpan.org and install it from the command line via the "nmake, nmake test, nmake install" mantra instead of using CPAN or ppm?

As a last thought install CPANPlus and see how it fares. From my experience it has better diagnostic messages and direct support than CPAN or PPM.

--- demerphq
my friends call me, usually because I'm late....