can I do the 3 steps from the d:\modules folder

yes, you can, from within the unzipped folder. But you need to do a 4th step: make install. Note: DO NOT copy files into your perl\lib directory directly. make install will take care of that for you.

a module in turn refers to other...

unfortunately, if you are manually installing packages, dependencies are not automatically resolved. You will have to resolve them yourself. That is the beauty of using ppm. It resolved dependencies for you.

davidj