Generally I recommend to downgrade (or upgrade) your ActivePerl to 5.8.8 build 817 (or rather 5.8.7 build 815 I use) to avoid a post-installer issue of the GUI version of ppm. You can get older versions of ActivePerl from ActiveState.
Avoid 5.8.8.816, which is buggy and may cause problems while installing XS modules. See ActivePerl's change log for details.
Latest version (5.8.8.820 as of writing this) of ActivePerl may be a good option as the post-installer issue is almost fixed. However, note that you are advised to take care while upgrading older versions of ActivePerl (equal to and lesser than 5.8.8.817) to later versions, due to the change of @INC priority. See ActivePerl's installation manual.
If you want to downgrade PPM, you can install PPM ver 2.x from CPAN. Avoid older versions of ppm than 2.1.8, which don't know nothing of PROVIDE attribute of the recent ppd files.