thanks for your post, sundial, it inspired me to take another wack at shaking the bugs out of my CPAN set-up, which, now, seems to work just fine

I hadn't been able to download a module I wanted, but now after I did

sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell
install CPAN
reload CPAN
[download]

, it seems to be alright again. A person like me might spend months away from this linux partition before being able to address it again, so sometimes I can't remember what all I've done, what is still buggy, what modules I have, etc.