Well, I don't have an ORA_HOME environment variable set at all, but I do have an ORACLE_HOME environment variable. It is set to C:\oracle\product\10.1.0\Client_1 Then in my System variables "Path" the very first thing in the path is %ORACLE_HOME%\bin; ... Then in my User Variables (when I right-click on My Computer->Properties->Advanced->Environment Variables) at the top it shows the value of "PATH" beginning with C:\oracle\product\10.1.0\Client_1\bin; (Again as the very first thing in the path.) I took a look at the files in that directory and there are 81 dlls most starting with "ora.." so it seems like it should be the right place. I have Oracle - OraClient10g_home1 installed. If I open a command prompt and type set the Path var shows "C:\oracle\product\10.1.0\Client_1\bin" as the first thing in it. I also have Toad installed by the way and it pulls datasource options from my tnsnames.ora file to get datasource defs. I am able to submit queries with no problem on Toad. I think Toad requires an Oracle client to be installed correctly in order to work.

I noticed when I open PPM and type DBI it looks like I have two installed. First it shows DBI site 1.601 and then it shows DBI perl 1.58 (where site and perl are under the Area column). There are also 3 other versions available two for 1.602 and one for 1.604. Not sure if this is related to things, but I was thinking DBD-Oracle was dependent on DBI. I tried uninstalling both DBIs but it would only let me uninstall the 1.601 one. After this I clicked on the 1.58 one to be upgraded and it made a new DBI this time 1.602. (The 1.58 one was still showing as installed also.) I uninstalled and re-installed with trouchelle's DBD-Oracle. Still no luck... (Thanks so much to everyone for the pointers so far. Let me know if you have any more ideas.)