Thank you both for the advice. I suspected I should try compiling all the libraries required by the GD module myself, and I will try that... UNLESS my perl is binary compatible with ActiveState's, and I can just take a pre-built GD module for Perl 5.8 from some perl repository. So that leads me to a trivial question: Is my Perl binary compatible with ActiveState's? Both are Perl 5.8, though I use the Perl source found on CPAN and not ActiveState's to build. I believe ActiveState also builds with Microsoft tools. I would guess we might be binary compatible? What do you think? I'll have to try.