You say 'it falls over the connect line'.

What does that mean? Does it die, saying "cant open db"?
In this case you should provide more information in your die string, like die "cant open db: " . $DBI::errstr . "\n";
This would give you the error comming from the database.

You can also use the printerror and raiseerror flags, take a look at perldoc DBI for that.

update: fixed bug