Cannot connect to Oracle thru OracleConnection

Question

Hi,
I'm new somewhat new to this forum, so fwiw, I have searched through this forum trying to find a similar solution to this problem, but to no avail, so I figured I would post it. If this is a FAQ, then my apologies and point me there!
I recently did some housekeeping on my pc and uninstalled OracleXe (using a doc i found on the web) and then reinstalled Oracle XE.
According to the registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORACLE\KEY_XE\ODP.NET\Version, I'm using the OracleDataAccess.dll 10.2.100 to connect.
my version of XE, again looking at the registry here, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORACLE\KEY_XE\Version is 10.2.0.1.0
I have a project which has been running for sometime and it no longer works, I decided to create a simple console sample to see if the problem could be isolated. Here's a snippet of it for ref, only thing left out is curly braces, main and namespaces.
// i have this in tnsnames.ora and set this up with database web page
strin connStr = "Data Source=HR;User Id=hr;Password=hr;";
OracleConnection ocn = new OracleConnection( connStr );
try {
ocn.Open();
catch ( OracleException oex ){
Console.WriteLine("error was: {0}", oex.Message );
When i run this code an exception is thrown when Open is called, but the exceptions message is blank!
I've tried a few things to figure this out. I checked if I could connect using sqlplus > hr/hr@HR and that works fine. Thinking it might be GAC related, I took a sneak peek at the GAC and I do see a 10.2.100 dll in there as well as the various resource dlls for that version. In addtion there is a Policy 9.2 Oracle.DataAccess 10.2.100 too.
I turned on tracing, set values in the odp.net registry entry (under Oracle\KEY_XE
I set tracelevel to 1 and traceoption to 0. The file it emits contains entries and exits and some warn entries..
Any ideas as to what might be wrong ?
thanks for any help you can provide,
Sincerely,
J

Answer 1

update: Solved!
Thanks for the help.
I guess in the end, it was that a reboot was required because
when I came in today and gave it a run through, it was doing considerably better.
Ming, thank you,
it turned out that this was not the problem.
thanks,
sincerely,
J__