ive never used PWS before, so i cant offer any information on how to configure it (however, every time i see PWS mentioned, it's usually a complaint about some ass-backwards way that it has to be configured)... i just wanted to drop a suggestion about two alternate (free and win32) servers that i thought you might want to try out and compare to PWS ;)

apache now runs on win32 and (as far as i can tell) is just as stable as the unix variants. i have it running on my windows 2000 machine at home (along with activestate perl and php4) and i havent had a single problem with it yet....
link: apache.org

a lesser known win32 server is sambar. it's more limited than apache (doesnt support a lot of the interesting mod_* things that apache does), but it *does* support perl/CGI, and is great for testing of simple perl CGI sites. (i used to use sambar on my windows 95/98 machines before apache was stable enough on win32, and had no complaints)
link: www.sambar.com

check them out... neither one of them requires you to go anywhere near regedit.exe ;)