(a) Apologies if this has come up before ... and ...
(b) I don't want to start a "my Linux distro is better than yours" war, so don't go there ...

As a Win32 developer, I want to make sure my Perl stuff will work on *nix ... but how? Most of my previous attempts at Linux installs has ended up with wailings and gnashings of teeth.

You might want to check out ZipSlack (I got my copy off a Computer Shopper CD) - it can be copied to a FAT/FAT32 partition with 100Mb free or a ZIP drive and booted from there (you may need to restart in DOS mode, or boot from a floppy). It's a lot easier than trying a full-on installation.
Got it working on an NT4 box (PPro 200; had to change an NTFS partition to FAT) and Win98 laptop (AMD K6-475).
One neat thing about this distribution is that it ships with Perl 5.6.0.
Might be worth a dekko if you're running Win32 and want to check your code (I haven't done much more than get a console up and have a nosey around with a Perl print "Hello World\n";, so I haven't tried anything fancy!).
Write your Perl code on Win32, copy it to the FAT partition, reboot into Linux, and check it.
With Code Red; VB .NET meaning a re-write of VB6 code; and XP activation, we might never go back to Win32 8-) ).