ActiveState is what I recommend to everybody and this is what lives in my Win98SE box at home. I am not familiar with other pre-compiled distribution for the Wintel platform, but anyway this seems to be the most popular anyway.

I think your other choice, provided you have a C compiler, is to build your own Perl from sources. I've never needed to do that... You might also take a look at running Perl under cygwin, but you should have a *very* good reason to do so.

Just remember to grab gzip/gunzip and nmake along with your ActiveState distribution :)

Best regards

-lem, but some call me fokat

Update: Also check which build of ActivePerl will you download. At the time of this writing, both 5.6.1 and 5.8.0 are out. I am running 5.8.0 in my PowerBook and have found no issues with it so far, but YMMV.