Hi, Ed: The problem was caused by the different architectures for perl (32-bit) and MySQL(64-bit). Leopard only had 32-bit perl and most of the modules I wanted were also only in 32-bit. Since installing a new perl was strongly discouraged in the perl MacOSX manual, I uninstalled the 64-bit MySQL and installed a 32-bit MySQL. I was able to get DBD::mysql to work by installing the fink version of DBD::mysql v. 4.005-11. There is a problem with MySQL v 5.0.41 for Leopard. MySQL looks for its libraries at /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql/ when they really are in /usr/local/mysql/lib. The best workaround I found is to go to /usr/local/mysql/lib, create a mysql directory (sudo mkdir mysql) and then make a soft link to all the files in /usr/local/mysql/lib (sudo ln -s /usr/local/mysql/lib/lib* ../mysql). Also, when I uninstalled DBD::mysql, it took parts of Mysql perlmod with it so I had to reinstall Mysql perlmod with CPANPLUS. The real pain is that my other programs (mostly numerical models) are all 64-bit so I have to change my paths in cshcrs when I want to run the program using the perl modules and reinitialize UNIX. I also had to load a 32-bit netCDF and other stuff too. I don't know if these same problems arise in Snow Leopard but I am upgrading so I'm about to find out!I may just go with 32-bit for everything this time. Deb