I found the solution to my problem, see Thread DBI on Windows 2000 29th Nov 2001.
Sadly the situation is probably a RTFM/P solution. But which manual/page do I read. As it stands the Active State binary distributions of Perl have a set of flavours, I needed "MSWin32-x86-multi-thread". Others may require the "MSWin32-x86-object" or other flavours. You can determine this from running the following: perl -v As such you have to go to the link 'http://www.activestate.com/PPMPackages/5.6/' for the PPM files. Here you download the DBI.ppd and relevant DBD file (for me it was DBD-Oracle8.pdd) because my Architecture is 'Multi Thread (Enabled)' I had to go into the directory below called 'http://www.activestate.com/PPMPackages/5.6/MSWin32-x86-multi-thread/' from here I down loaded the associated *tar.gz files. The *.ppd files look like XML ... so open them with an editor and edit the HREF field of the CODEBASE element to be the file name of the downloaded *tar.gz. E.g. I have downloaded the DBI.ppd and the DBI.tar.gz file to the same directory, don't bother extracting the DBI.tar.gz. I edited the DBI.ppd file to say <CODEBASE HREF="DBI.tar.gz" /> (NB you will only need the relevant IMPLEMENTATION element, delete the others). ** These edit were only required because I am behind a firewall and I was unable to connect directly to the activestate server via ppm. >From the command line I moved to the downlaod directory and ... C:\ ... > ppm install DBI.ppd This worked fine. The same principle was applied to the DBD-Oracle8.* files. I have had no problems since. Took me a few days to get here though. Thanks for the responses. I hope the above helps someone else in the future. Dale.
