This thread has been a good lesson to me about playing the blame game. Generally I'm very careful about jumping to conclusions and laying blame without considerable investigation but I certainly threw caution to the wind on this one.

When I got up this morning I decided to run the `dir` example again and my computer rebooted. Last night, before reinstalling ActiveState, I had closed all running programs under Win98 like a good Windows user. I also remembered that no restart was required by the Setup program. So the reinstallation was probably not necessary at all.

I got to thinking about why I would be having similar problems using the same software on two different machines when other users weren't and then it occurred to me that ActiveState and Win98 aren't the only things my two computers have in common. I also have Norton Utilities running on both.

Not wanting to unfairly assign any blame this time, let me just say that when I disable Norton Anti Virus Perl seems to work fine and leave it at that. Thanks to all respondents to this thread.

@a=split??,'just lose the ego and get involved!';
for(split??,'afqtw{|~'){print $a[ord($_)-97]}