Thank you for all your replies!

I think I have a solution. I'm uploading a full installation of perl 5.6.2 on the website so I can use CPAN to mangage my private modules (I have SSH access) and ensure they are located properly. (I wish I could do this and use 5.8.x but their webserver rewrites all perl scripts to use their interpreter) This way I can just use use lib 'mod-path' to over-ride the default lib paths in my scripts maintaining binary compatibility.

I can't believe their perl environment, I found that half of the @INC library paths are invalid and there are duplicate copies of modules scattered through the others... highly thinking of overriding all of @INC since I now have the full dist.