Thanks Rob.

Your comments jogged my memory. I used to use ActiveState perl. The reason I was fiddling with perldb.ini is that my .perldb file wasn't working. After some experimentation, I realized it wasn't even being read. When I renamed it to perldb.ini it began being read, but with this error message we've been discussing.

But at some point in the past it did work and without that message. That's why it was in my home directory. And so it was probably back when I was using ActiveState perl. My guess is they may have fixed this problem in their code, but that fix never made it into Strawberry perl.

If I find the time I might test that hypothesis by having a peek at the ActiveState perl5db.pl code. And I will definitely post an issue per your suggestion.