/me scurries off and finds where he's answered this question before.... cut... paste...
RH9 caused more than a few problems for me with a number of modules until I edited my /etc/sysconfig/i18n file. Here's mine:

#LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LANG="en_US"
SUPPORTED="en_US.UTF-8:en_US:en"
SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"
[download]

It looks like some modules (like CPAN!) don't like that UTF-8. If you don't want to monkey with your system-wide locale setting, just type "export LANG=en_US" and then try your install again.