Others said

-- Upgrade to WinXP, or at least 2000 -- definitely agree.

-- Install XAMPP -- yes, this is the most painless way to go for apache. XAMPP apache also has a perl addon. Install that as well.

To this I add the following.

1) After you have perl apache and the other usual suspects up, working, and configured, back yourself up. Use two partitions, and back up your system partition using Norton Ghost. Then if something funky happens later down the line, you can revert back to your nice installation without spending hours and hours figuring out which module you needed to install to accomplish what.

Here is tutorial for creating a sample app using perl and mysql. I found it helpful.

I was in almost the same situation as you a couple of months ago, and I am really glad I took some time to learn perl. It's incredibly powerful. Good luck!

thomas.