I have used the Active State PDK in the past. I rather liked it as a developement tool. The integration of the debugger was a nice bit; I like having multiple windows open in the code and the debugger, so the ActiveState methodology fit right in. At the time I thought that it was a worth while investment.

The down side I found was that modules hit CPAN several days (or in hard cases weeks) before they were available from the PPM repository. But that's a bad thing only if you have to be at the (b)leading edge; for the more cautions of us, it should not cause problems.

Lately I have been doing most of my coding on Linux/Solaris and "porting" over to Windows during the last week or so before a code release. It does require a little pre-planning to keep the module libraries in sync. You can't just add a new version of something without verifying that the module is available in both environments. Like a lot of other things, it's just a matter of a little prior planning.

If I were developing in a pure Windows environment again, I'd upgrade my PDK. But I'd also look at pEdit and at Eclipse as well. (My current IDE is called 'vim'.)