Oh and just to confuse things, I made a dummy program taken from the perldocs for perlembed. Now if I use a file like:

use  Net::Config;
1;
[download]

that works fine.

Using the original file (replacing Net::Config with Enmac::Transaction) brings back the same error.

However if I plug the working perl snippet into our original program I get a new error:

Can't load '/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.5/aix-64all/auto/Socket/Socket.so
+' for module Socket: (null) at /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.5/aix-64all/X
+SLoader.pm line 68.
 at /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.5/aix-64all/Socket.pm line 399
[download]

gah! it gets worse