addendum:

After searching usenet group comp.lang.perl.modules and others, the only concrete suggestion that I thought would be helpful was to edit /etc/ld.so.conf and add the path where libdb-4.4.so is found. I did that and followed up with the recommended action of running /sbin/ldconfig .

"make test"
continues to produce the very same errors as stated above, even after completely rebooting the computer.

-bC