Hang while connecting to Oracle 9.2 DB in VS 2005

Question

I use ODP 9.2.0.401 (but also tried 9.2.0.7 and 10.2.0.1) against a 9.2.0.4 Database, Client and server residing on separate XP SP2 machines.
I use the English version of Visual Studio 2005 on a German XP machine.
In one solution, I successfully access the DB in a web service project but cannot connect the Db from a simple test form in another project using the following code:
Imports System.Data
Imports Oracle.DataAccess.Client
Public Class DalTestForm
Private dbConn As OracleConnection
Private Sub Button2_Click(...) Handles Button2.Click
dbConn = New OracleConnection()
dbConn.ConnectionString = "Data Source=sbs0.wks001;Persist Security Info=True;User ID=sbs0;Password=sbs0"
dbConn.Open()
Debug.Print("Connected")
End Sub
End Class
The Debug.Print is never executed and the IDE hangs. Only a reboot of the client is able to kill the process "DalTest.vshost.exe" which completely loads the CPU.
I was going to use System.Data.OracleClient which works fine but there I cannot pass array parameters to stored procedures can I ?
I start loosing too many hours on this now. Any help is much appreciated.
Thanks
Stef

Answer 1

There is not ODP.NET version officially supporting .NET 2.0.
If you use any 1.x version (9.2.x or 10.1.x) , it could work or it couldn't.
In my case it doesn't work. I will wait until the next version which is said to be 2.0 compatible (in later may it seems)
And as you find the MS provider doesn't accept array parameters.
Sorry