You are way past this but, for future knowledge or for searchers, when you get a dos window that just closes, you are getting an error in that window. In order for it not to close you need to open a cmd prompt and manually run each command until you find the one with the error.
That said it seems like you now have two problems, the first was the connection issue which had nothing to do with perl. The second is that you now have a perl issue. Make sure that the perl/bin folder is in the path statement. Your path statement may have gotten messed up with the uninstall/install of perl.
I also found this entry by cavedude
http://www.eqemulator.net/forums/sho...14&postcount=1
Basically it says to run version 5.8.8 build 822 and reboot after installing it. I have had this (perl) issue before and I am not sure what I did to fix it, but I am running perl 5.8.8 build 822. Please read the entire post above as there are some links to files that might help.
Once the perl issue is fixed open a cmd prompt and change to your eq server folder and run
wait for it to finish, then open another and run
This should give you an error you can see and we can proceed from there.
HTH