Thanks to both for your answers. I tried perl Makefile.PL LIB=(alternate directory) and that got me to the point where it tried to create the subdirectories. I then discovered that Perl is installed on a different machine than where I am logged on, so I will have to repeat everything over there to see how it finally turns out. (I'm learning much more about sysadmin and network topology stuff than I originally bargained for, let me tell you.) For all its other faults, I installed this module on Windows in about 3 minutes by entering "ppm install XML-Parser". (sigh)