You seem to have installed ActivePerl for 32 Bit by accident. At least, it tries to load dll's from the 32 Bit subsystem (ole32.dll).

Also, did you run any AntiVirus? Run the ActivePerl installer with or without "Run as Administrator..."?

I'm pretty sure it's the 64 bit version, all of the .msi files have x64 in the name: ActivePerl-5.14.2.1402-MSWin32-x64-295342.msi

Laptop is running Trend Micro Anti Virus, desktop runs Norton. For grins and giggles let me disable the anti-virus and retry the install. I've never had a problem with anti-virus programs causing issues, but it's worth a shot.

All installs were run under an account with full administrative rights.

Update: Shutting down the AV tool made no difference. Nothing reported in the install log.

I've found that on previous versions of Windows, this Windows checkpoint stuff just doesn't always work "as advertised".

I would go back and use the Windows Software Mgmt to uninstall all of what you have done - uninstall. Then reboot. This is often necessary!

Windows of any version was just not designed to run continuously. And worst case, the re-boot won't hurt anything. Spend a couple of minutes. The reboot sets environment variables and paths, cleans out already loaded .dll's and other stuff. The reboot will take less time that it took for you to write this post, so do it.

Do a clean install of the 32 bit ActiveState. I would explicitly specify to install the 32 bit version. If you do not need the 64 bit features (larger data access), then don't worry about it. The 32 bit version will run on your 64 bit machine.

This is suspicious: ppm-shell seems to work fine, I updated all standard packages, nothing changed. The standard installation should work just fine "out of the box".

Summary:
- clean out what you've done before as much as possible
- reboot
- install clean with 32 bit version

The "boot it 3 times rule": I learned this in the old days of Windows NT. This is true on Win XP and I would presume on Win 7. What happens it that when Windows boots, it is able to fix one serious error and continue to boot even to the point of actually booting with an additional unfixed error. The 2nd boot can "fix" this additional error.

Ask Microsoft guy why this is. I don't know. I can just report that I have seen this many times. I have never seen a "rollback" work in a complicated situation without a reboot.

The ActiveState 32 bit version will work on a 64 bit machine - end of story.

Rolled back in this context means Uninstall, clean out ActiveState registry keys, remove Perl directory, reboot, install earlier version.

I'll give the 32 bit version a try to get me going, but I will need to figure this out at some point because "they" will want to use the 64 bit version on the 64 bit servers.

Thanks for the help.

At some point, I figure that Active State will get this sorted out. Right now is "not yet". I think that you will be happy with the 32 bit version. I don't know why you want to run Tk on the server. But that is beside this Tk and 64 bit support issue. BTW, some of these 64 bit apps run slower if the underlying memory is just 32 bit. Mileage varies. Greater than 2GB is the "trigger" requiring 64 bit. Other than that I see no problem.

Have you considered Strawberry Perl?

Yes, I have. I have not played with Strawberry Perl for about a year and I have heard good things about it. That said, for this project the ActiveState toolkit (specifically PerlApp) will be a better fit.

The PPM GUI is what is crashing. It fails when invoked from either the start menu or from the command line.

I would try the 32 bit version (x86) and try http://community.activestate.com/forum