Are you sure it’s an ActivePerl?
XAMPP comes with it’s own Perl, and it’s not an ActivePerl. If you’re using XAMPP, it’s generally better to use the components that are included, since they’re all configured to interoperate out of the box.
XAMPP also uses MariaDB, rather than MySQL, and we’ve found that DBD-MySQL built for MySQL isn’t 100% compatible with MariaDB.