In my attempts to mimick this problem I got an error about missing Config.pm when running perl -V when I removed all the perl except perl.exe and perl58.dll and perl5.8.0.exe (Yes I am doing this under perl 5.8 because that is all I have on Win32). The config.pm that it is refering to (I think) is c:\perl\lib\Config.pm and it contains alot of the info needed for the -V screen. I don't know if this helps you.