Let me help you out some more.

Firstly, there's no longer any excuse for not having a compiler one Windows.

You should go have a look at Stennie's "Camelpack" which is an install of ActivePerl that pre-installs a proper make and a proper compiler along with Perl, so that you can install from CPAN normally.

ActiveState's PPM server is dead and twitching, there are almost no major APIs that are available in relatively modern versions any more.

If there's anybody using ActivePerl that isn't using the CamelPack yet so there can install from CPAN when needed, they damned well should be.

And the guys working on Vanilla/Strawberry seem to have fixed a lot of the bugs now, that used to appear in things like Term::ReadLine::Perl and so on.