As a small, Perl-only starter set for the Unix Utilities, I now avoid downloading and installing cygwin and use the Win32 Unix Utils as found on http://unxutils.sourceforge.net, as the three programs needed by Perl are only tar, gzip and wget for good measure. With these, the ugly errors of mismatched cygwin1.dlls are gone, and these three programs are easily put where the perl.exe binary resides too.