I nearly lost it with frustration and anger after discovering ppm had been significantly changed. It is a basic principle of a mature product not to completely change the functionality and interface.

When I finally discovered one could run it as a shell (by running a different command name now, ppm-shell) my co-worker and I had to sit there for minutes watching every single CPAN module get loaded into some sort of cache. In frustration hit ctrl-C and just copied the binaries from one machine to another.

I don't care how much better then "new" ppm is, it makes ActiveState Perl a product that cannot be relied on in a hurry - who knows how else the fundamental utilities might suddenly change anytime in the future!