Looks like I had hit BUG 4703814. The Oracle analyst very quickly pointed to it as the culprit. The title on the bug is a little misleading though, which is why I'm hoping I overlooked what should have been an easy patch to find -- "OEM CANNOT PROGRESS BACKUP JOB AND JOB STATUS HAS NOT CHANGED". Installed the patch to the agent and all's well. Rich > Next test: I reasoned that since my domain login tested successfully > before, that the failure using the local account may lie with it's lack of > privileges. Using the page Niall sent me, I verified that my domain account > had those privs -- it didn't. It only has "Log On As Batch Job" set > explicitly, in addition to the Administrators group privs. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l