Without being able to see your table structure it's a little rough to guess at the code, but here's the closest thing that I have (and it uses a list of countries to do it).

print OUT '<select name="country">';

foreach $row (@$countries) {
    if ($row->[0] == $billcountry) {
        print OUT '<OPTION SELECTED VALUE="' . $row->[0] / '">' . $row
+->[1];
    } else {
        print OUT '<OPTION VALUE="' . $row->[0] . '">' . $row->[1];
       }
}

print OUT "</select>\n";
[download]

Where the query was:

$countries = $dbh->selectall_arrayref("SELECT country_id, country_name
+ FROM country");
[download]

The nice thing about setting up the form this way is that you're getting the unique id values returned in your form submission rather than the name of the country.

Obviously, in this case $billcountry is a value set elsewhere that you are matching against.

Hope this helps.