After upgrading from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1, the Oracle instance on my desktop failed to start. I opened Services and found that all the usual Oracle Services had been deleted. The Windows Installer removed the Oracle Services from the Registry. I was going to be a hero and reconstruct the Registry using the oradim utility but I was worried about other Registry entries that might be missing, so I did a full and complete deinstall (using Oracle's handy deinstall.bat) and reinstalled everything. Tony Marshall Seattle -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l