I reinstalled Ubuntu completely last night, and took the opportunity to go to AMD64 mode. I had to sacrifice the cheapo ndiswrapper wireless card, so am now running a switch off the wireless bridge. So it works now!
It looks like Perl really doesn’t like 64-bit. CPAN‘s having difficulty building.
i just had to roll back and am now running on an older kernel, b/c ,my new feisty upgrade doesnt automount any sort of removable drive – la-me. And apparently Im not the only one.