$CBAS, I wanted to (still want to) find a good answer to this myself, so I did a little bit of research not too long ago..

Unfortunately, given that you have limited money (as I did), there really aren't very many options available to you..

First of all, you may want to read about ISAPI Perl.. ActiveState Perl ships with an ISAPI module, and this has some advantages over a simple CGI script and external Perl interpreter..

Another thing you can try (sorry, but this costs $$$) is PerlEx.. Its not as expensive as some "optimizers", but it does cost quite a bit, so YMMV :o)

Now, onto other stuff, I'd strongly urge you to reconsider Apache, even for Win32.. I run an Apache server on Win2000, and while its not the fastest, it handles moderate (100 concurrent users) load quite happily.. Note that Apache 2.0 (still in beta) promises to deliver equivalent performance to non Unix platforms, so this is also something to look out for...Look here for more details...

Finally, you can get mod_perl binaries for Win32 from this location.
HTH