Oracle 9i, 10g, 11g on same machine...11g not working....

Question

Hello All,
I have a dilemma.
I have a server that originally had 9i client installed.
We installed 10g and ODP .Net to gain use of some new funcionality used in .Net and batch processing.
Halfway through testing we realized that 10g's version of ODP.Net has a memory leak issue.
11g was found to correct this issue so we installed it on the server as well and it solved the problem.
Life was good.
9i, 10g, 11g, and ODP.net were all working well.
However, this was a test server. We now needed to go through the same installs for the production server.
On the night of the software install someone made a mistake and installed 10g on the test server again for the second time, after 11g was already installed.
So at this point the test server has:
9i
10g
11g
10g
And now many of the applications on the server are not working correctly and no amount of config changes seemed to fix it.
So we decided to uninstall 11g and then 10g and start over.
At this point we have 9i and 10g installed and the applications are working correctly.
We have tried to reinstall 11g and configure multiple times and 11g will simply not work.
I am stumped at this point. The application that actually does use 11g and ODP.Net simply stops executing at the point it attempts to open a connection with NO ERRORS.
An Exception does occur but there are no contents or error messages in the exception. I have never had this happen before. How do you fix an error you dont have?
So at this point I am just reaching out to see if anyone might have a suggestion. The next step might be to perform a system restore to the point where life was good (before 10g was installed a 2nd time after 11g).
Anyone?

Answer 1

Thanks gdarling.
I was hoping to just start the thread and go from there as sometimes information overload makes people pass on reading the whole post. I am glad you still read it:)
To start off with here are the entries (unedited in my PATH variable):
E:\oracle11\product\11.2.0\client_1\bin;E:\oracle102\product\10.2.0\client_1\bin;E:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1;E:\Orant9i\bin;
I recently moved the 9i path back to the front in order to get the other applications on the server working again as some were erroring out with this when 11.2 was first:
*"OCIEnvCreate failed with return code -1 but error message text was not available"*
I searched for a long time as to the cause of this error but did not turn up much. Most of the posts just mention that the client was installed incorrectly.
Policy files:
I compared the assembly of the "working" server to the "bad" server and they appear identical as far as I can see.
Directories
-9i has one directory
-As you can probably see from the path, it still looks like there are 2 installations of 10g on the server. As well as remnants of three directories that resemble 10g install directories.
-11g has one directory
Couple observed behaviors:
1.
running sqlplus from the 9i and 10g directories works.
running sqlplus from the 11g directory results in the following error:
E:\oracle11\product\11.2.0\client_1\bin>sqlplus.exe
Error 6 initializing SQL*Plus
SP2-0667: Message file sp1<lang>.msb not found
SP2-0750: You may need to set ORACLE_HOME to your Oracle software directory
2.
Running tnsping works from the 9i and 10g directories
Running tnsping from 11g results in this:
TNS Ping Utility for 32-bit Windows: Version 11.2.0.1.0 - Production on 13-MAY-2
010 09:32:32
Copyright (c) 1997, 2010, Oracle. All rights reserved.
Message 3511 not found; No message file for product=NETWORK, facility=TNSTNS-035
05: Message 3505 not found; No message file for product=NETWORK, facility=TNS
*(NOTE: THIS ERROR ALSO OCCURS ON THE "GOOD" SERVER)*
Registry:
There is a difference in the registry.
The "good" server has this entry in the ORACLE area:
KEY_OraClient10g_home1
KEY_OraClient11g_home1
where as the "bad" just has
KEY_OraClient10g_home1
Both servers have ODP.Net folder containing:
2.112.1.0
There are also other entires in this registry area but they are the same.
It wasn't our original intention to have all three clients on the same machine. Halfway through our system testing of a new process we realized the 10g has a memory leak which was corrected in 11g.
So we just installed 11g. These are supposed to be able to coexist right?
It sounds like we could have just installed 11g...
I am going to look into your suggestions.
As far as sysinternals I am a novice. And I am assuming it would need to be loaded on the server...is that correct? Or should I be using it on my local machine with the application in question running?
Getting more software (sysinternals) installed on the server might be a hurdle...
Thanks again