I was going to disagree with you but I figured that I should try to download the BioPerl core and try this out. Well, that was something like 1/2 hour ago. Apparently the 'core' is stored on github rather than CPAN and that may be the problem. If I just want a handful of packages to solve a particular problem I probably should not have to download this huge thing. If I had known this before I probably would not have made this suggestion.