aha, Problem solved... it would appear that our build environment was broken.

Our makefile for aix didn`t have

perl -MExtUtils::Embed -e ldopts
[download]

for defining the LDFLAGs needed at build time, indeed it was some other mad concotion that had some but not all of the appropriate libraries. I had been building my test program outwith our build and only discovered it when I dropped it into place to see what would happen

Thanks for your help, now I'm off to slap some co-workers

CJC (who will take no pleasure in dishing out the punishment ;)