You are perfectly right "ask", "brondsem" etc.. activestate.com has a very nice perl executable. I have downloaded it. It works great. No problem at all thank you!

By the way I there is a real problem with the win32 perl makefile. I have been trying to compile perl on windows ME (I know windows ME is the worst windows32 flavour but it is very stable on my computer so I have no reason to change it yet) for more than 10 hours without any success. I successfully compiled miniperl but never succeeded to compile dynaloader

I am sure that the perl win32 makefile is bugged: at least under my windows version and contrarily to what the perl makefile says /f is NOT a valid option for the "del" command

Anyway if someone with 15 years of professional programming experience is unable to compile a very popular language (i.e. perl) on a very popular (somehow ugly) Operating system(i.e. windows), I think there is a real distribution problem.

"make" is really not a friendly tool when it works ok everything is fine but when there is a problem understanding the problem's nature can be very very tricky (hint for the free software developpers: if you are searching for new programs ideas: a make program that would be user friendly for instance that would not use "tab" as a significant symbol, would report simple error messages,...)