I have tried both - because I have Cygwin installed on my machine for development using GCC for a totally different processor. Using Cygwin I had one or two niggling issues that I just couldn't seem to solve. They were not serious and to be honest I cannot recall exactly what they were. I haven't tried Cygwin for about 12 months.

ActiveState, on the other hand, has been in daily use here for some years now. It has not always been trouble free, but the more recent releases have generally been very good. The issues have not been with Perl itself, but more to do with ActiveState's module support. Some Tk modules just never seem to make it into their radar view, other pretty basic modules seem likewise to get under the radar out there in BC as well.

We use AS for Windows-GUI development - all using Tk generally targetted at WIndows 2000/XP. We also use Perl for Web Applications using CGI::Application mainly. We tend to develop and test initially on XP with AS then move things to a RH7.3/Apache/mod_perl environment here for pre-production testing.

Does that help?
jdtoronto