Oracle Database Discussions

Hi all,
I'm new to perl and oracle.
I have Oracle 10g R2 installed (not XE) on Win XP. I also installed Perl 5.6.1 from AS. Then downloaded DBI and DBD:Oracle and installed them using PPM. Now, I want to test dbd:oracle. I used to following (that I got from some source online):

$ORACLE_SID = "orcl";
$ORACLE_USERID = "system";
$ORACLE_PASSWORD = "...."; (the actual password will be here)

$ENV{'ORACLE_SID'} = "$ORACLE_SID";
$ENV{'ORACLE_HOME'} = "c:\\oracle";
....
....
....
local ($oracle_sid, $username, $password) = @_;
local ($temp_dbh);
local($tempID, $tempPassword, $tempKey);

print " (*) Attempting Oracle Login ...\n";


unless ( $temp_dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:Oracle:$oracle_sid", "$username", $password, {AutoCommit => 0}) ) {
&programError("Oracle Login Failed as $username", "", "$DBI::errstr", "dba-mail", "dba-pager");
exit;
}

print " OK\n\n";

The output I got is:
Oracle login failed
ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied <DBD: login failed>
The system cannot find the path specified.
The system cannot find the path specified.

First when I got this error there was no Oracle_HOME as an environment variable. I added that to C:\Oracle and rebooted the system. Also, the Perl that came with Oracle 10g R2 was 5.8.3. So, I renamed that folder (in Oracle home) from perl to perl1. After doing these changes too I got the same error.
Can somebody please throw some light on this and tell me what I have to do ?

Thanks a lot