Thanks this does help

In the output from building Bundle::CPAN the build of Digest::MD5 failed because it could not find cl.exe the linking program that comes with Visual Studio. It may also come with what was MASM. MASM seems to have been renamed to Build environment and might need Visual Studio to install it anyway.

Relevant line:

NMAKE : fatal error U1081: 'cl' : program not found
Stop.
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With XML::Sax it seemed to fail as a dependancy was unsatisfied. It seems to need XML::NamespaceSupport which you attempted to build next. (Good!). Unfortunately the build failed with the following output

Microsoft (R) Program Maintenance Utility   Version 6.00.8168.0
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1988-1998. All rights reserved.

makefile(435) : fatal error U1035: syntax error : expected ':' or '=' 
+separator
Stop
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indicating a syntax error in the makefile. Possibily the module assumes a GNU or UNIX-like Make binary. This banner indicates nmake.exe is being used. If I remember correctly it has differences in its makefile syntax :-(

IMHO there is no simple answer to these problems. The Bundle::CPAN found you were running windows and adjusted accordingly but needed a cl.exe linker to link binary objects. Can you get Visual Studio or do you already have it? I am not sure what is best to fix the other problem. You have tried various make utilities. I will try installing these on my development machine and see what I can do: make some helpful instructions or a binary package.

All of this may come down to the fact that on windows one doesn't get the compiler included with the OS. This is why I try to use linux or something similar _where possible_

Updated: Reread root node. You do have Visual Studio 6! Cool! Make sure that the dos environment variables are registered so it can find the cl.exe etal in the path and the .lib files. There would have been an option to register these variables at installation of VS 6. If this was not done there may be a batch file you can run to do this.

--blm--