checking control panel shows me I do indeed still have activeperl 522 installed in addition to build 805. Trying to remove it causes an illegal operation as well. I'm now removing 805 in the hope I can then remove 522, and start over.

The script didn't work before the installation but it was just saying syntax error. This is my first attempt at perlscript rather than perl, and I was hoping win32::asp would be gentler on me

the script looks like this btw (it's building a decent query string for a site search.)

use WIN32::ASP;

$sqlStatement = "";

If (GetFormValue('SearchText') ne "")
{ 
    my $conj;
    my $query=GetFormValue('SearchText');

    $query=~s/([\(\)])/ $1 /g;
    $query=~tr/A-Z/a-z/;
    $query=~tr/a-z0-9() //cd;
    $query=~tr/ / /s;
    $query=~s/^ //;
    $query=~s/ $//;
    
    foreach $word (split(/ /,$query))
    {
        if ($word=~/^(and|or|not|\(|\))$/)
        {
            $word=~tr/a-z/A-Z/;
            $sqlStatement.=" AND" if (($word eq "NOT") && ($preWord!=~
+/^and|or$/i));
            $sqlStatement.=" $word";
            $conj=$word;
        }
        else
        {
            $sqlStatement.=" AND" unless ($conj || !$sqlStatement);
            $sqlStatement.=" keywords LIKE '%$word%'";
            $conj="";
        }
        
        $prevWord=$word;
    }
}

$sqlStatement="WHERE $sqlStatement" if $sqlStatement;

$Response->Redirect("search2.asp?searchtext=$sqlStatement");

%>
[download]

thanks, andy