Jared, do you set the correct path before starting, or rather trying to, the dev and qa instances. I am not operating any production databases on Windows, but I know that Windows can get easily confused with multiple Oracle homes/bin directories in the path. What I always do is remove any oracle directories from the path - and with 10g also clear the perl environment variable - and then I have an oraenv.cmd that prepends the the OH/bin and java directories before starting an instance - just like oraenv on unix. What happens when you try that. Not necessarily the whole setup, just removing all oracle references from the path in a command shell and then only prepend the OH/bin for the database you want to start. >All environment variables are correct. >ORACLE_HOME=D:\oracle\ora92\dev >ORACLE_SID=DEV >PATH contains Oracle paths from only one ORACLE_HOME, DEV. I overlooked that until I removed stuff to avoid overquoting. But I am not sure how to take this. Does that mean that "PATH contains Oracle paths from only one ORACLE_HOME, DEV" only when you try to start dev, or does PATH contains Oracle paths from only one ORACLE_HOME, DEV all the time, particularly when you ran OPatch to patch prod? Regards Wolfgang Breitling Centrex Consulting Corporation www.centrexcc.com -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l