i figured it out later that day; i was running
slackware 7.1 current (as opposed to stable)...
here's what they had to say in the Changelog:

 Tue Feb 20 14:10:32 PST 2001
d1/perl.tgz: Recompiled without -lndbm to fix DB_File
module. Thanks to Toshikazu Yoshikawa for posting a problem
report and fix.
[download]

since my copy was outdated, all i had to do was recompile perl (!!5.6.1!!) and remember not to flip that switch (8

many thanks to Ant and everyone else out there who helped me out.