Greetings,

the standard (perl) environment (no fiddling) is as follows:

PERL5DB [unset]
PERLDB_OPTS=RemotePort=127.0.0.1:2000
[download]

this will start the IDE. After fiddling:

PERL5DB=BEGIN {require 'perl5db.pl';}
PERLDB_OPTS [unset]
[download]

What makes (half of) the difference is PERLDB_OPTS: if it is set, the GUI starts no matter what PERL5DB is set to...

<slaps loudly on forehead>: OK, so now I know. AS actually does two things:

1. Hooks into the RemotePort option of perl5b.pl to direct the debugger to the GUI but also....
2. sets a registry key (HKLM\Software\perl\PERL5DB) to its own version of perldb (perl silently honors these keys as if they were environment variables).
3. So restoring the original behavior one has to both unset PERLDBOPTS *and* PERL5DB

Quite tricky (perhaps too much so...).
Thanks for pointing in me in the right direction - now the smoke has cleared and the mirrors are broken :-)
Cheers,
alf

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