I have since had sleep, and replicated the environment out at the client site on my own dev. machine. It turns out that freetds used with DBD::Sybase has affected my code. I went with a basic install with the added options of --with-tdsver=7.0 and --enable-msdblib to be able to use freetds with a SQL Server 7.0 database. I installed DBD::Sybase using ctlib from freetds and could successfully connect to SQL Server 6.5/7.0. It's just that it produced problems with the return and string equality tests. Since freetds is still kind of in the whole development phase, it always goes to state, YMMV. In my case, my mileage was 0. Mike ALL HAIL BRAK!!!