Terminal funkiness with ActiveState perl

I just finally got on top of an annoyance I've had for a while: on my work machine I use MKS Toolkit - which provides a lot of the common unix tools for developers using windows. It provides its own Perl build, but I've been using ActiveState's for a while, and didnt want to complicate synchronizing my work across the different machines I use perl on. An unhappy side-effect of installing MKS Toolkit though is that the CPAN interactive shell suddenly starting spitting goobledy-gook to the terminal.

I looked around in the CPAN config, remembering there was some terminal questions in the setup, but nothing I changed had any effect. Not having had to mess with terminal settings / shell environment much before I was stumped until I googled a little and found this:

(MKSSoftware KB Article: Why do console escape sequences appear when using ActiveState Perl in debug mode?

Turns out MKS Toolkit changes the TERM environment variable to nutc, which ActiveState's perl doesnt support. They suggest using ansi or vt100, which worked for me: set TERM=ansi.