finally got sick of trying stuff.
Downloaded the source for HTML::Entities from my Linux machine. Stuck the Entities.pm file in the same directory as my perl script on my Win32. and did this:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use HTML::Entities;
my $input = <<EOM;
“And all was well with the ‘ol’ world!”
drüben, Straße
EOM
print encode_entities($input);
exit;