Short answer - Aha! It is something on my machine at work, that old 5.6 and such. I got it working on another machine. Thanks all.
Longer answer - so I figured maybe something is wrong with my installs. So, hopped to this darling work laptop, from which I am now typing. Flushed the old 5.6 ActivePerl, installed fresh 5.8 ActivePerl Used the new GUI PPM4 to install one dependency for my code (Date-Calc), and Test-Bundle. Converted Unix commands to Windows > set HARNESS_PERL_SWITCHES=-MDevel::Cover
prove cover
Producing ots of pretty messages warning me that, " This version of Devel::Cover was built with Perl version 5.008. It is now being run with Perl version 5.008008. Attempting to make adjustments, but you may find that some of your modules do not have coverage data collected. You may need to alter the +-inc, +-ignore and +-select options. And some very pretty html showing me how few of my tests ran :-) But that only becuase of other requirements like having a mail server accessable, which I do not at the moment. So, at least now I have a working version to compare with whatever I was doing wrong on my work desktop. AND more importantly, I can get coverage info at all, so as to improve my Kwalitee. Thanks to Paul, James and Yves, each of your answers were helpful at points in this challange.
