I guess my concern is that if XAMPP is doing things differently in order to get a "LAMP"-like setup working on Windows, its DB.pm package must be catered for its own setup and using another package would not guarantee success. It seems I just need to figure out the right incantations for the DB package. Fortunately, I have only the one subroutine doing the database connection, so it would be a cinch to update that and make it useful for all the routines that call it.