Welcome to the club.
If you find the reason please post. I will do the same.
Adar Yechiel Rechovot, Israel
Sweetser, Joe wrote:
Oracle 8.1.7.4.1 Windows 2000 SP4
Intermittent error that (so far) is only resolved with a server reboot. Error manifests itself many ways but the most obvious are inability to connect to the database and/or inability to log into the server itself. If you do get logged in to the server...inability to start an application; be it cmd or sqlplus. The error at that point is "Failed to initialize application". No errors in alert.log and database comes up fine after reboot.
-- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l