Hi Jack,
Indeed, I can spot many virtues in your attempts to handle the somewhat bulky Win32 applications from the bright side of perl.
It may be a digression, but reading your point (2) I wondered if in the meantime you may have managed to create fields with data type AutoIncrField?
I've been trying this

my $Access = Win32::OLE->new('Access.Application', 'Quit');
my $Workspace = $Access->DBEngine->CreateWorkspace('', 'Admin', '');
my $Database = $Workspace->CreateDatabase($Filename, dbLangGeneral);
my $TableDef1 = $Database->CreateTableDef('_FilterDefinitions');
my $Field = $TableDef1->CreateField('AutoInc', dbAutoIncrField);
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but it just doesn't seem to work, although it works for all other data types (dbText, dbInteger, dbDouble etc.).
I also admit it's perl-related, but may be seen as an Access question rather than perl...
Could it be, because dbAutoIncrField is only a DAO, but not an ADO constant?
Would be grateful for any ideas in this direction...
Cheers,
Thomas
mailto:engel_thomas@gmx.net