Great. Many thanks to you both!
unfortunately 'source' doesn't seem to be supported by our version of perl (version 5.005_03 built for MSWin32-x86-object) ... will get newer perl to try
and using the .perldb example doesn't print "Reading ~/.perldb options" ... maybe will be fixed by newer perl?
(or perhaps .perldb should be in a different directory than the current working dir? will investigate, though 'perldebguts' isn't found by perldoc on my system either)
... onward!