I had a similar problem a few months back on my laptop when I neglected to verify and upgrade the packages for quite some time. I couldn't install packages that I wanted to.

First off, get into PPM and type verify. This will tell you if any of your packages are out of date. This will also tell you whether or not you're making connection with ActiveState. If it can't verify any of your packages, then you're not experiencing the same problem I was and you really need to follow what dws was saying above.

But if it tells you that some of your packages are out of date, then that's the reason why you can't install packages. I found that when this happened, the only two I could actually install were PPM and SOAP-Lite. After that, the problem was fixed. If you can't install those packages, go up to The 6xx Repository and pick them up there.

Sarah
All non-Perl nodes will be eliminated. Fear is your only defense.