I am promising myself that when I get to work this morning I will give up trying to get Inline.pm, SWIG or XS to work in my obsolete non-standard MP-RAS 5.005 environment.

Thanks for clarifying that the boot_ thingie is associated with DynaLoader. Clearly if XS were working properly then boot_ would exist and be visible.

My conclusion is that XS, like Inline.pm and SWIG (which wouldn't even compile. It seemed to expect a C++ compiler) are not the way to solve this problem.

TMTOWTDI means not to knock yourself out trying to solve a problem in a particular way, because if that way is not working there is an easier way.