Maybe it's not interpreting your date range correctly (so your start and end data effectively map to the same (invalid/default) day...). Have you tried specifying the date strings in a different format when initialising VT_DATE? The docs seem to suggest something like "July 1,2007" or "July 1 2007".  Other than that, I'm afraid I can't help...

We may actually be closer then I thought.
I reran the VB code and got a result similar to what PERL returned. This is good.
What I need to understand now, is what is dump saying.
Would would you be kind enough to give me some clue what is going on below.
many thanks
kd
$VAR1 = [
[
bless( do{\(my $o = 27163868)}, 'Win32::OLE::Variant' ), '#N/A Mth Lmt'
]
];

It looks like you are getting a 3-dimensional array, with the top level array being an arrayref (in Perl, all nested arrays must be arrayrefs anyway). Data::Dumper essentially prints out the data structure as Perl code which, when executed, would (re-)create the data structure being dumped (ok, manual object instantiation would typically be done in a more readable fashion, but you get the idea...).

(BTW, the representation of the squared brackets of the innermost array has automagically been turned into a fake link, because you weren't using <code> tags... but anyway :)

The two values of the innermost array are a Win32::OLE::Variant object, and a regular string. This means you can access/print the given data structure like this:

# get the type of the variant, as a number/ID
# (see the docs or Variant.pm for what they represent)
print $v->[0][0][0]->Type(), "\n";

# the stringified value of the object, if scalar
# (for lists, use ->Dim() and ->Get() ...)
print $v->[0][0][0], "\n";

# the string '#N/A Mth Lmt' - nothing special here
print $v->[0][0][1], "\n";
[download]

In case you should ever be getting more than one pair of values, you'll of course want to use loops...  Good luck!