thank you, cdarke ! I already tried to interchange use and require without any success (I really tried a lot of things before). But your link to the dlopen problem invited me to try to combine RTLD_NOW with RTLD_GLOBAL in the dlopen call, and now it works !! you saved my day !

My fear is that the application in which I want to embed the perl interpreter, misses this option too when loading shared libraries, and unfortunately I have no influence on this (it is a commercial predilivered one). But at least I know where to look and check further (reading about compiling and linking... what a pitty, really prefer spending my time with perl itself :-))