perl, v5.8.7 Windows 2003 PPM 3.3

[Sisyphus]

..
..

I am curious why that might be.

I think "bad choice" is a little strong.

I have yet to encounter a problem using
this compiler with AS Perl.

Only example I know of is Win32::SharedFileOpen - but there may be other
cases, too. Here's a brief explanation from Steve Hay:

" The problems occur whenever CRT resources such as filehandles get passed
between the different CRT's. For example, suppose you have an XS module
that uses a CRT function to get a filehandle and then the XS passes that
filehandle to some PerlIO function. If you build the XS with VC 7 then you
get the filehandle from msvcr71.dll, but if Perl was built with VC 6 then
you're passing that filehandle to msvcrt.dll. That definitely doesn't work.
"

(No problem with MinGW because it uses the msvcrt.dll runtime.)

On the other hand, I have not been able to
compiler Perl successfully using that (miniperl runs into trouble
something that has to do with AMD64 / XPSP2 / Symantec AV, if I
understood correctly).

Did you follow the directions given in the perl source's 'Readme.win32' ?
I've not tried to build perl using the free MS compiler ... so I don't know
how good those instructions are. I expect they're excellent instructions -
as you say, the problem might well be something else.

Cheers,
Rob