I also know nothing about MySQL on Windows, but SQLite should be pretty easy to put on a CD-ROM. And for most web applications it should have enough features.

Thank you, Moritz, for your very prompt response! As a result of your suggestions, I was able to expand the range of terms I had been casting into the Google waters hoping to drag out the right information...and as a result of casting the wider net, I have found something that looks quite promising. I'm not ready to say I've "netted" it yet, but I will try to remember to post back here if/when I have gotten a working solution.

There are actually several possibilities I've found. One of them is this:

Server2Go

It's claims to be a free (donations accepted) utility that can run a webserver from a CD-ROM.

The others which I have found so far do not seem to be so free. (I might be willing to pay something, but not royalties every time I distribute a CD...that would be simply too much hassle.) Nevertheless, here are a couple of those pay-wares:

Stunnix Perl Web Server 2.10

DWebPro 6.8.26 (free for non-commercial)

Blessings,

~Polyglot~

I just wanted to report back on my progress. I was finally successful in making Server2Go work for me, after about a full day spent installing, reinstalling, configuring, and tinkering. It is not well documented for the MySQL and the Perl portions of its usefulness. If you wished to run merely the simplest of Perl scripts, and no MySQL required, you should have an easier time of it.

I successfully imported a 300 MB+ MySQL database into it and added appropriate users and reconfigured root permissions via phpMyAdmin, which comes with the server. All of the configuring was done on the hard drive of a Windows Vista machine, and once the server2go.exe file is run, the server runs PHP, Perl, HTML, etc. website, and I found all of the modules for Perl that I needed most already installed.

Considering the price, I am happy. If one paid much for it, one might expect more documentation.

Blessings,

~Polyglot~