thankyou all for help. I think the main tips that repeated a few time were keeping the case the same and copying the password file over to the standby rather than trying to create it in the standby. The other thing I noticed is that the password file has different names on Linux and Windows and its not always clear in someone's writeup which O/S they are talking about - linux is orapwSID and Windows ? pwdSID I think. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l