Hi! I just encountered a strange phenomenon: on all our instances, we have a user called "ADMRMAN" that is used for RMAN/Legato backups. This user has sysdba privileges. On a test instance I did a: alter database backup controlfile to trace then I altered MAXDATAFILES and re-created the controlfile. But then the user ADMRMAN was no longer able to connect as sysdba... A "more" on the pwd-file showd that ADMRMAN was still in it, but some characters in the pwd-file changed (probably "active" flag or something like that). Does re-creating the controlfile delete users from the pwd-file? This is 9.2 on HP-UX 11i. Thanks, Helmut -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l