You might try to do a "find / -name Spec.pm -print" to see if by chance you have two versions installed in separate perl libraries. In other words, if your install is putting version 0.8 into /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005 but version 9.6 is in /usr/lib/perl5/5.00503 this would be consistient with the problems you are describing.
I believe that was just the problem, as deleting the old one got me to my next set of errors :) The install left a set of messages on the screen *recommending* getting rid of the old files, it didn't really insist - and putting it off was the problem (I renamed them for safety)
One of the other list members is helping me that privately .. getting my HTML Parser up to date so the next part of the install won't fail.
Thanks, Jale