I use xemacs 21.4.1 with cperl 5.0 on Windows XP; it seems to handle POD correctly.</p.

While I do think cperl-mode is much better than perl-mode, I do have minor gripes with it. Also, I found the outdated version that comes with the FSF emacs to be preferable to several of the later versions, but that's just me.

Cperl-mode has a lot of settings that can be adjusted by the user, so before doing something drastic, like using ed, I'd see if twiddling cperl-mode's settings will make it behave more like you want.