crikey!! i see now.. thanks for the advice..
as you stay i may stick to the repos if i can. finding the CPAN mods has been a revelation (ie.. i use to pass all my data by hand instead of using the CGI mod). but it's frustrating getting it to work localy.
Maybe that was just a poor example, but if you have to go to CPAN to get CGI.pm, then you probably haven't had repos to grab from either. CGI has come 'in the box' with Perl for quite a while now I think.