Unfortunately, that tends to be the case, which is a crying shame. It rankles with me that the only way to use Perl on the Win32 platform forces so many people into either purchasing VC++ (and throwing good money into the MS coffers!) or obtaining it through "dubious means", when there are several free compilers available.

There is the Cygwin route of course, but that adds yet another unnecessary and complicating layer into the mix.

Unless we could build up a head of steam behind one, free, native Win32 compiler, the situation of dependancy upon VC++ will continue:(