This archive (Perl-5.00502-mswin32-x86.zip) contains the latest Perl binaries, compiled with Visual C++ 5.0 and some important Perl packages, including the DBI (Database independent Perl 5 interface), drivers for MySQL, ODBC and CSV files, the libnet, libwww and MIME-tools, Crypt-DES, Crypt-IDEA, MD5 and HTML::EP. The selection is arbitrary and bases on my personal needs. You might be surprised, how large the archive is: The reason is that it in fact contains two Perl versions, the standard Perl and the threaded version. The former is said to be about 20-30% faster, however, the latter might become more and more important in the next months, as hopefully many portable applications become available for threaded Perl. To install this archive, make sufficient free storage on your C: partition (about 21 MB), extract it into C:\Perl and use the Windows explorer to assign the extension .PL to one of the following: C:\Perl\bin\MSWin32-x86\Perl (WinNT, no threads) C:\Perl\bin\MSWin32-x86-thread\Perl (WinNT, threads) C:\Perl\bin\MSWin32-x86\Perl95 (Win95, no threads) C:\Perl\bin\MSWin32-x86-thread\Perl95 (Win95, threads) That's all! To generate problem reports and the like, please use perl C:\Perl\bin\perlbug and send the message to perl5-porters@perl.org. Of course you might CC: me: Jochen Wiedmann joe@ispsoft.de