in reply to weird problem or perl-bug?

My guess is, that each element of @db needs to contain a name entry in its keys. Maybe try:

#my $xx = $db[$vars{_recNo}]{'name'};
$db[$vars{_recNo}]{'name'} = 'exists';

[download]
or 
#my $xx = $db[$vars{_recNo}]{'name'};
$db[$vars{_recNo}]{'name'} = undef;

[download]
and see whether this gives you the same results. This is the "autovivication" PodMaster talks about. 
perl -MHTTP::Daemon -MHTTP::Response -MLWP::Simple -e ' ;    # The  
$d = new HTTP::Daemon and fork and getprint $d->url and exit;#spider
($c = $d->accept())->get_request(); $c->send_response( new   #in the
HTTP::Response(200,$_,$_,qq(Just another Perl hacker\n))); ' #  web

[download]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom