.. installed Strawberry Perl and tried to run a test script. Still no joy and the same error is being encountered

Assuming strawberry has been placed in it's default location, run:

set PATH=C:\strawberry\c\bin;%PATH%
[download]

Then re-run the script. That should ensure that the correct libxml2.dll gets found. (If the script still fails with the same error I'll be truly amazed.)

Cheers,
Rob