Andrew, You probably already solved your problem. I want to point out that you can easily check the environment of a running process with command pargs -e <pid>. If you see an extra /, you know you need to match that in your shell where you start sqlplus. The command varies with OS. See http://yong321.freeshell.org/computer/ProcEnv.txt Speaking of the double slashes, we intentionally make use of it to work around an oraenv issue. On 11gR2, we like to have $GRID_HOME/bin as part of $PATH for convenience. If I run . oraenv, changing to +ASM, I'll have *two* $GRID_HOME/bin paths. Later I run . oraenv to change back to the DB instance. $GRID_HOME/bin is gone from $PATH. If I add an extra / to somewhere in $GRID_HOME/bin, the problem can be avoided. Since this is only changed in ~oracle/.bash_profile, no running process is affected. Yong Huang -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l