Have you ever thought of using an ISAM-like database instead of Access? Soooo simple to connect to. No MDAC (Microsoft Data Access Components) required. Your problem is a good example to leave the world of SQL connections and go to a Key/Value pair ISAM-like/NoSQL system.

Simply unload your MS-Access data to Flat Files (fixed-length "text" records), then build you some indexing to those records using Perl SDBM key/value pairs. The value is the record offset in bytes to seek to (position the file pointer) for random access.

You will be persistently storing the key/value pairs in a hard disk hash table which can be tied to a Perl program hash table.

SEE: Joint+Database+Technology at perlmonks.org