Thanks for the suggestion. I plugged in "ODBC" into the first listing from above like below, and my connection times dropped to 0 (zero) like those of the second listing above.

use DBI;

$start = time;
$dbh_metro = DBI->connect("dbi:ODBC:metro");
$finish = time - $start;
$Response->write("<CENTER><H2>took $finish seconds to connect DB</H2><
+/CENTER>\n");
[download]

So this means that myself and anyone else who wishes to use PerlScript vs VB writing ASP's should be using the ODBC with DBI instead of ADO. Let's look at those numbers again...

DBD::ODBC	0 - 1 second	Perl Style DB access methods :-)
DBD::ADO	30 - 40 seconds	Perl Style DB access methods :-)
'ADODB.Connection'	0 - 1 second	MS Style DB access methods :-(

Update: After some serious hair pulling about why my machine was unexpectedly rebooting itself whenever I tried to compile anything, or run the Beta of Komodo, I discovered that the antivirus program was causing not only the reboot problems, but actually caused the ADO time to increase as shown in the chart. Actual ADO times without A/V running are the same as the other two methods.

ryddler