If you go to the following URL, you will find a protocol how I built Perl (5.5.3 and 5.8.0) successfully under Win32 using the Microsoft Visual Studio C++ 6.0 compiler.

http://www.engelschall.com/u/sb/download/win32/Build_Win32_Perl.txt

At the time there was someone releasing the CRT library that was needed on CPAN.