Just an update on this: The Dumper.pm error was a warning not an error. I thought it was an error because the debugger (Komodo) couldn't see the tied hash. Just for yuks I tried to print out the keys of the hash, and it worked.

So the bottom line is that once I installed DB_File it was working, but for some reason the debugger couldn't (and still can't) look at the tied hash.