I had one such occasion on 9.2.0.5.0 under HP/UX 11.11 just last week on a dev DB that gets rebuilt from scratch weekly. The sniped process prevented the release of shared memory even after a SHUTDOWN ABORT (confirmed by ipcs -a), which prevented the new instance from starting up. I haven't needed to take time to troubleshoot it, since it's just a dev DB. I'm really not a Winders-type, but I don't think even if it could (RPC?) that I would attempt to run something like this remotely. Rich ________________________________ From: Joel.Patterson@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:Joel.Patterson@xxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Wednesday, September 13, 2006 2:30 PM To: Jesse, Rich; oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: RE: alter system v shutdown abort I have never had such bad luck... but with orakill, I did come across the tidbit, (yet to be seconded), that it has to be run from the server itself to work. Joel Patterson