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PPM4 fails on Windows systems for users with non-ASCII usernames

OS: Windows | Product: ActivePerl | tags: activeperl multibyte ppm4
Question: 

PPM4 fails on Windows systems where users have non-ASCII characters in their username and/or there are non-ASCII characters in common paths. Is there a work-around for this?

Answer: 

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This issue has been resolved in ActivePerl 820 and higher
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PPM in ActivePerl 819 on Windows fails to start up for users with non-ASCII user names. The error message displayed is something like:

  ppm gui failed: DBI connect('dbname=C:\Documents and Settings\
    \Application Data/ActiveState/ActivePerl/ppm-MSWin32-x86-multi-thread-5_8.db',
    '',...) failed: unable to open database file(1)

This is caused by limitations in Perl's handling of Unicode and we plan to address this issue in the upcoming release. The recommended workaround is to tell PPM to access its state database from a path consisting of plain ASCII characters only. It is achieved by setting the ACTIVEPERL_PPM_HOME environment variable to the name of a directory that ppm should use. For instance:

   C:\> set ACTIVEPERL_PPM_HOME=C:\Perl\Temp
   C:\> ppm

PPM 4 can't find package widget::statusbar

OS: All / Any | Product: ActivePerl | tags: activeperl environment gui PPM ppm4 vpm
Question: 

When I try to run PPM 4 in graphical mode it complains that it can't find the widget::statusbar package and exits. How do I make this work?

Answer: 

The problem is likely that you have the PERL_TCL_DLL environment variable set. This variable is set when you are using the Tkx GUI toolkit. PPM 4 also uses Tkx, but has its own version of Tkx bundled; hence, the environment variable points PPM 4 away from its version and to your ActiveTcl installation, which doesn't have all of the files necessary to run PPM 4.

The solution is to unset that environment variable before running PPM 4.