Dear monks,

Finally found the answer to my own question. The fault is with pre-0.85 versions of PAR. If you are unable to get a later version of PAR then  use Encode::Unicode; should fix it. If you have Activestate Perl with the standard repositories then these are, apparently out of date. The following commands (at the command line) should help.

ppm 
remove par
[download]

This removes the current version of par and then, again on the command line, enter the following command

ppm install http://www.bribes.org/perl/ppm/PAR.ppd
[download]

and this will install the latest version of PAR (0.86 at time of writing)

Plotinus