After several Days of working this out, I finally got it to work. The finished result is below. Thanks for Perl Monks for the ideas from this thread. Wouldn't have been able to do it without you! 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

# get the path to the library
use Config;
my $libpath = $Config{privlib};

# force CPAN::FirstTime to not default to manual
# setup, since initial CPAN setup needs to be automated
system("perl -pi -e\'\$. == 73 and s/yes/no/\' $libpath/CPAN/FirstTime
+.pm");

# initialize the Config.pm file
use Env;
$ENV{PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT} = 1;
require CPAN;
require CPAN::FirstTime;
CPAN::FirstTime::init("$libpath/CPAN/Config.pm");
delete $ENV{PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT};

# undo the change
system("perl -pi -e\'\$. == 73 and s/no/yes/\' $libpath/CPAN/FirstTime
+.pm");

# read in the Config.pm file
open(CONFIGFILE,"<","$libpath/CPAN/Config.pm");
my @lines = <CONFIGFILE>;
close CONFIGFILE;
# ..delete it
unlink "$libpath/CPAN/Config.pm";
# ..and then write it back out, replacing the line with the empty arra
+y urllist with a filled in array
open(NEWFILE,">","$libpath/CPAN/Config.pm");
foreach(@lines){
    if($_ =~ m/urllist/){
        print NEWFILE "  \'urllist\' => [\'http://ppm.activestate.com/
+CPAN\', \'http://cpan.perl.org\'],\n";}
    else{
        print NEWFILE $_;}}
close NEWFILE;

# install the packages
CPAN::install('SOAP::Lite');
CPAN::install('XML::Simple');

1;

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In reply to Re^4: Automating CPAN Configuration by Anonymous Monk
in thread Automating CPAN Configuration by dsheroh

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