there's a small chance this happend because of an osx upgrade; however the os is the same version as the g5 desktop. i think i've reinstalled everything except for perl, which i really don't want to rebuild, for fear of screwing up the laptop.

Chances are that you upgraded mod_perl and/or the postgres libs, but are using the old perl libraries, so the old shared object files are not usable.. I guess you should upgrade perl too, from your OS X upgrade bundle; or maybe it suffices to rebuild the postgres DBD.

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}