I think it's a bad idea to combine ActivePerl and MinGW.

ActivePerl will actively install MinGW if needed. Seems to speak to the contrary.

If I remember correctly, ActivePerl is built with Microsoft's Visual C, and Strawberry Perl is built with MinGW.

Perl gives MinGW an option to create objects compatible with MS's compiler. (IIRC, it's almost entirely compatible without this flag too.)