Smyler's advise is excellent.
You may also profit by going to your file manager, select tools |folder options and click on the filetypes tab. Then hunt up the entry(ies) for perl and see what you find.
You say you've "downloaded and installed" but don't specify whether you're referring to a binary (Active State, for ex) or whether you compiled source.
If the former, consider whether you allowed the install to associate the binary with files of type ".pl" in which case there surely should be an entry in the filetypes tab, as least for action "open" (and if so, you may wish to add an action "edit" pointing to your favorite text editor).
Now some scattershooting:
- I'm not enuf of a sysadmin to rule out your "devious scripts" but somewhat suspicious thereof. Do you have install (admin) rights on your box/C: drive? (I suspect yes from what you wrote, but ??).
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And have you cd'ed (in a DOS window) to C:\Perl\bin and checked execution from there?
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And -- Smyler's comment re PPM is right on though you may have to add the local repository to your list of available sources.
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HTH...