I'm the same, using CPAN drives me nuts. First it insists on downloading an ancient version of nmake.exe from the net, when there is already a much more up to date version on my system, simple because I keep my executables where they are supposed to be (eg. the compilers bin directory in this case), not where cpan thinks it belongs. It's in my path. Just use it already.

But before we get to that, it insists on downloading some damn index from cpan that takes forever. I wouldn't mind, but the next time I use it, it then wants to verify if it's copy of this mysterious dratted index is up to date. which takes longer than downloading it did, and it never is, so it goes ahead and downloads it again anyway.

Then, if the compiliation fails, which always seems to on Win32, I've no idea what it has succeded in doing and what not, because it hides all the output from me.

Like you, I prefer to download the tarballs (or sometimes just the .pms for simple one-file perl-only modules), but the dependancies are a pain. Maybe we should write a script that just builds a list of dependancies by querying cpan?