Anyway, yay for obsessive packrattery.
To get Perl-Tk to work on windows/cygwin at all I had to download a 3-year-old version of it and pass mysterious arguments to perl Makefile.PL, and of course I was instructed to do this by a cryptic mailinglist post I found through google. Now that sort of experience takes me nostalgically right back to my early undergrad unix-hacker days of 1999 or so if anything does.