perlknight,
There are several ways to manipulate your @INC path. If you set the PERL5LIB environment variable, what ever path you put in there will be unshifted onto @INC. This can help if you want a particular path to be seen first. You can also look at the use lib pragma.
I've have already tried setting PERL5LIB var to /usr/lib/perl5/ but not luck, it is still checking for /usr/local/lib and I've also tried setting it to /usr/local/bin/lib/perl5 and ended up with same result, it still expects perl to be in /urs/lib/perl5.
I have even tried linking it where perl is to /usr/local/lib/perl5, This got me over the hump durig make, but failed on test. Any idea?