It took a little variation on this theme, but I finally have attempted this approach. I discovered that my company requires ftp to go through a proxy and this was preventing ppm from reaching ftp.esoftmatic.com since that repository uses ftp rather than http, used by most repositories. I ended up manually ftp-ing to a local directory and declaring that as a local repository. ppm took it from there.

With DBD-Oracle and DBI-Oracle loaded, I try my test program:

#!

use strict;
use warnings;

use DBI;

my $dbh = DBI->connect('dbi:Oracle:adhoc',
                       'foo',
                       'bar',
                       { RaiseError => 1, AutoCommit =>0} 
                      ) || die "Database connection not made: $DBI::er
+rstr";
$dbh->disconnect;
[download]

And get an error dialog box from the connect with:

perl.exe - Entry Point Not Found

The procedure entry point Perl_Glockhook_ptr could not be located in the dynamic link library perl58.dll.

I am quite unsure where to go next with this?

Thank you monks for your help.