Its probably something obvious but I have been stuck with this for a
while so any pointer appreciated.

On Oct 24, 9:22 am, Eric <eriqcar... at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote:

Its probably something obvious but I have been stuck with this for a
while so any pointer appreciated.

It's not exactly obvious, but the problem *could* be that your
compiler uses the MSVCR80.dll C runtime, whereas your perl uses a
different C runtime. For example, if you're using ActivePerl, then
perl is using the MSVCRT.dll C runtime. This will produce an
*irreconcilable* problem when a handle created by MSVCRT80.dll gets
passed to MSVCRT.dll (or vice-versa) as the receiving dll knows
nothing about the handle it has received.

In short, the compiler that built openssl and Crypt::SSLeay should be
using the same C runtime as perl itself. If you're running ActivePerl,
this means you should compile openssl and Crypt::SSLeay with either
MSVC++ 6.0 or the freely available MinGW port of gcc.
If you're committed to using your current compiler, you might have to
first build perl using that compiler (thus ensuring that perl uses
MSVCR80.dll).

I did see somewhere that there's a free version of VC 8 that uses
MSVCRT.dll - it, too, would therefore be usable with ActivePerl (if
you can find it).

Have you considered installing Crypt::SSLeay using ppm ?
ppm install  http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppms/Crypt-SSLeay.ppd
That should also avoid the problem (... again, assuming ActivePerl),
though you might also need to avoid using the openssl dll that you
built (as it, too, will be using MSVCR80.dll).

There's also the possibility that the problem is totally unrelated to
the issues I've raised here :-)

Cheers,
Rob