Here is the Solution:
Martin Evans on the dbi-user mailing list was able to finally find the source of this error, here is the text of his reply:

I analysed your log and did the same thing in ODBCTest which used to come with MDAC and it fails in the same way: SQLPrepare(print 's' select count(*) from table print 'e') SQLNumResultCols() returns SQL_ERROR and invalid cursor state. so, I'm afraid, there is no bug in DBD::ODBC and the problem is in the MS SQL Server driver. Interestingly, our ODBC-ODBC Bridge makes you code almost work because it inserts a call to SQLNumParams between the SQLPrepare and the SQLNumResultCols and that puts the MS SQL Server Driver into a different state. I say "almost" because it does appear to hightlight another bug in the MS SQL Server driver later on where SQLMoreResults returns SQL_NO_DATA but a later call to SQLNumResultCols returns 1 column and this persuades DBD::ODBC there is a column and it fails on a call to SQLDescribeCol (because SQLNumResultCols lied and there is no result-set). Your only choice is to take the prints out.

I ended up building DBI 1.45 and DBD::ODBC 1.11 on my machine.
I was still able to achieve the desired result by using a suggestion our DBA made of substituting a SELECT everywhere there is a PRINT and that seems to work nicely. For statements that return multiple result sets I ended up using the following:

#!C:/perl/bin/perl -w
#DBI 1.45
#DBD::ODBC 1.11
use DBI;
$dbh =  DBI->connect("dbi:ODBC:tmpDB", 'username','password', 
    { PrintError => 1, RaiseError =>0, LongReadLen => 65536,
          odbc_async_exec => 1, odbc_err_handler => \&errSub }
);


$command = qq/
select 'start'
select name = 'dbi-user'
select 'end'
/;


$sth = $dbh->prepare($command);
    die $DBI::errstr unless $sth;

my $rc = $sth->execute(); 


do {


    my @row;
    while (@row = $sth->fetchrow_array()) {
          print join(",", @row), "\n";
    }

} while ($sth->{odbc_more_results});

$dbh->disconnect;

sub errSub {

     my ($state, $msg) = @_;
     # Strip out all of the driver ID stuff
     $msg =~ s/^(\[[\w\s]*\])+//;
     my $err_text .= $msg."\n";
     print "Err($state):",$err_text;

}
[download]

Thanks to all who responded.

JamesNC

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