in reply to Can't crack a DBI Error:

I may be way off base on this one, so this may not be much help, but I recall having this same error and removing the call to finish seemed to clear things up.

Take a look at finish for more information.

You may also want to looking into using selectrow_arrayref instead of $sth->fetchrow() if you only want 1 row.

Anyway, hope this helps.