I got it figured out and it's installing now.
Couple questions . . . is it necessary to have the hs-plugins working? Does it make the job easier if I have this working? What does this 0plugin do exactly, anyway?
As for 'make' not being rerun in the CPAN shell, 'force install' should fix it... CPAN tends to be a little overzealous, and does not retry a build that failed in the same session.
gcc 3.3 should have solved things for you, but then CPAN refused to try again, and that's why it worked later.