If you still have problems, try making your path to the database file a full path, ie H:/data.mdb rather than data.mdb (say). Rather trivial but it has caught me out sometimes on my NT4 machine at work.

You could also try a different connection string:

Driver={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)}; DBQ=database.mdb
[download]

I would also recommend taking a look at the OLE based access to an Access database. Here you can have access to the ADO stuff directly within Perl. An example bit of code for inserting and retrieving the last insert ID can be found in: Retrieving the last insert ID with Access.

However, if you do try the OLE stuff then you really do need to learn how ASP does it as it works in almost exactly the same way. I know thats almost swearing here (oops :P) but the docs for recordsets and connection objects in ASP are quite complete so you should be able to find what you need.

Hope that helps.

Update: Added connection string