I just made a fresh Cygwin install on a fresh Windows XP system, and ran cpan's config. Then I tried typing

install HTML::Parser

It began trying the install process, but retrieving the files was taking too long because I'd selected a slow site as the first site to try, and CPAN won't give up and move on to the second in the list (why do we even give multiple mirrors?)

So I tried to ctrl-C out of it. I couldn't. Instead of switching to a different mirror, it switched to wget, and eventually started downloading some data. I left, and came back later, and tried again:

install HTML::Parser

and I got

The module HTML::Parser isn't available on CPAN.

So I reinstalled Perl, and erased my CPAN Config.pm file and my MIRRORED_BY file, and re-configured CPAN. But from then on, no matter what I do, no matter what module I try to install, I get the message

The module X isn't available on CPAN.

Help?