Have you tried emailing the author or DBD::XBase? He would know what it supports, and would be the one to fix any problems.

One solution to consider is renaming or copying the files with names that it can't handle to ones that it can.

Another solution is to use the low-level XBase access modules. Your original code was just reading the data. It doesn't need any of the power of SQL and DBI. You wouldn't have to worry about quoting identifiers in that case.