ActiveState maintain a useful table of the modules that are available through PPD and their current build state for various platforms. The table can be found at http://ppm.activestate.com/BuildStatus/5.6-F.html. Unfortunately the build status for File::Tail on Windows is indeed 'FAIL'.

As to the second question: The ActiveState built packages can also be downloaded as zip files from http://ppm.activestate.com/PPMPackages/zips/6xx-builds-only/. This allows you to maintain a local copy of the packages for distribution on disk, internal network etc. to computers which can't access the net.

inman