If you're not using the RaiseError attribute, you can check $sth->err to see if there was an error in the query. (I don't see where you specifically do any quoting of the values stored $username and $password, so that's still a possibility in my mind. btrott has a good tutorial on placeholders here.)

The other thing worth checking is: print keys %$pointer; just to see if having Login capitalized in the $user2 assignment is a problem (as it's all lowercase in the SELECT statement).

According to the Perl DBI book, some database drivers convert field names to all uppercase or all lowercase. You can coerce DBI into fixing this for you with the following modification: $pointer = $sth->fetchrow_hashref('NAME_lc'); That will make the hash keys all lowercase. 'NAME_uc' makes them all uppercase. 'NAME' is the default, doing no mangling at all.