Holy cow, thanks for the link. I tried searching for a while both on google and google groups and came up with nothing, so that's why I posted here. It's too bad that CPAN Plus did not address this problem. I am glad that I am not the only one with this problem though (i.e., I'm not crazy!)
The reason I would prefer to use CPAN than manually installing all the packages is because tracking and manually downloading all the dependencies (and their dependencies) is a complete pain. PEAR for PHP works, after all, so should CPAN. ;) Are there any alternatives to CPAN/CPANplus for perl package management?