I've never had problems with CPAN. The attempted re-install of Perl that chris is talking about was probably while installing netlib. If it finds it is already installed it will ask a whole bunch of questions regaring smtp servers and host names etc. Most of the modules will most likely be already installed if it is a managed server. The modules already on HostPros vservers were

DBI
DBD:MySQL
Date::Parse (part of the DateTime package)
Net::NNTP (part of the netlib package)
Net::SMTP (part of the netlib package)

So I only had to install one module:
Text::Autoformat

By the way. The download link is broken while I had email notification for replies and italicized quotes. There's a few other fixes too. I'm modularizing it so it will be easy to just drop in the section for vb2 without redownloading and reloading all the posts.

regards