that whole seen thing i was doing was uneeded as I only get one row, and it was obfuscating all the real issues. I took that out (which makes the code less robust as it only handles one row at a time, but that's all i need) and now it works. here the fixed code:

my %newhash;

while ( my $myRef = $test->fetchrow_hashref ) {
        foreach my $key ( keys %$myRef ) {
                next if ( $key eq "TRANS_ID" );
                my @tryit = split ",", $myRef->{$key};
                my $name;
                foreach my $number ( @tryit ) {
                        $name = $dbh->selectrow_array("SELECT PRODUCT 
+FROM SC_PRODUCT WHERE PRODUCT_ID = $number");                        
                        push @{$newhash{$name}}, $key;
                }
        }
}

foreach my $key ( keys %newhash ) {
        print "$key : @{$newhash{$key}}\n";
}
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-- I'm a solipsist, and so is everyone else. (think about it)