Okay, this is my bad, I apologize for bringing a WinXP problem to the Perl forum. It's clear to me now that this has nothing to do with Perl.

While I do not yet have the solution, it would appear to be a permission/privilege issue. If I run Apache from the command line (i.e. not as a service), then everything is happy (debugger comes up, etc.).

When I run it as a service, WinXP will not allow the service to open up a window such that I can interact with it.

I opened up the Start->Administative Tools->Services utility, opened Properties on the Apache2 service, clicked on the "Log On" tab, and clicked on the "Allow service to interact with desktop". After rebooting, this worked okay for me. Perhaps just logging out and logging back in would work okay, too. Simply stopping/restarting the service did not seem to work.

Thanks for all of the help, hopefully this is at least a little helpful for anyone else running Perl on XP on a corporate network...

-Dave