Edit: Oops, sorry, was meant as a reply to the OP! .oO( must be the heatwave )

Perhaps, using Strawberry Perl is a valid alternative for you?

When I'm on Windows, I use Strawberry Perl.
-- Larry Wall

I don't know if that is true, but I had no problems with nmake and friends when using Strawberry Perl. It just works. Installing SB-Perl and ripping nmake.exe out might also work? It's a bit fat, though (but lighter than the driver-package for a modern graphics card ;-).

From their web-page (my emphasis):

Strawberry Perl is a perl environment for MS Windows containing all you need to run and develop perl applications. It is designed to be as close as possible to perl environment on UNIX systems.

It includes perl binaries, compiler (gcc) + related tools, all the external libraries (crypto, math, graphics, xml ...), all the bundled database clients and all you expect from Strawberry Perl.