Yup, that works fine. Thank you so much!

So here's what I did... Of my several Perl-enabled PCs at work, one is a laptop. I brought that home to my apartment for updating. I first renamed C:\Perl to C:\Perl_5.8.8 and deleted the old %PATH% from the Win32 environment variables. Probably I'll just wipe it later, but until I do, it's safely preserved.

Next I loaded in ActiveState Perl 5.10 accepting all defaults so that it built to path C:\Perl which the installer recreated.

Next I searched all my work-related Perl scripts for $_ =~ m|\nuse\s| which gave me a list of every module used. This I boiled down into a do-nothing Perl script that only called said modules. Eye-balling this list I installed each in turn (if not part of base) from PPM repositories first...or from CPAN if lacking in those.

Then as a test I ran my do-nothing script to make sure it would indeed load said modules without complaint. Then I renamed C:\Perl to C:\Perl_5.10 and adjusted the %PATH% to match. Then after rebooting I ran the do-nothing script again. It did nothing without complaint so all was well.

That done I packed up the laptop, toted it back to work and uploaded both the C:\Perl_5.8.8 (just because) and C:\Perl_5.10 up to the corporate U: drive where all my other PCs can fetch them down from. Will be fetching rather than running from there, though. I have my reasons.

I went to my newest PC where earlier this week I'd been stone-walled trying to install packages because of some recent network update. I started out clean by blowing away my previous install completely. Then I copied down U:\Perl_5.10 into C:\, added a %PATH% to the new C:\Perl_5.10\bin\perl.exe and tried a few scripts. Viola! Issue resolved. Hurray!

The reason why I chose to be copying all of Perl and not just Perl\site to up to the U: drive, is because I intend to do complete installs into C:\ on my other PCs as well. Why not just leave U:\Perl_5.10\site in one place and let the other PCs work from that? Well, it's because our U: drive not in the building. It's not in the city or even the state. It's located more than a whole time zone away.

I have found that reading from or writing to U:\foo\bar poses a wee hazard. A full 99.99% of the time it's totally fine. But a couple of times I've had whole reports clobbered on a save-gone-wrong across that distance. So now, in spite of my boss's insistence, I work up my reports on my desktop and save to U: only at the end of the day, fearing the 0.01%. I'm treating all my scripts and logs that way also.