Perhaps I am unaware of a way to exclude specific modules from upgrading when running upgrade from the interactive cpan command line. If there is a way to do this, let me know. Otherwise, unless I set halt_on_failure to no (which allows the global upgrade to continue even if some module upgrades fail), then I can't complete the global upgrade. Setting halt_on_failure to no means when I do an install, failed dependencies will not halt the install, which is not what I want to happen.