i have installed the oracle odbc drivers hundreds of times on Windows XP
machines, but cannot get it to work in Vista. A test connection works in the
ODBC Administrator, but I get an ODBC call-failed message when trying to
connect from within my Microsoft Access database.

>i have installed the oracle odbc drivers hundreds of times on Windows XP[color=blue]
> machines, but cannot get it to work in Vista. A test connection works in
> the
> ODBC Administrator, but I get an ODBC call-failed message when trying to
> connect from within my Microsoft Access database.[/color]

Hi Magick,

There are many possible pitfalls. The best pace to ask would really be the
Oracle ODBC forum: there are many more folks there using Vista with Oracle,
than there are here:

[url]http://forums.oracle.com/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=145[/url]

You can read the forum as guest or get an OTN login to post, if you don't
already have one.

To get a good response, you'll need to state exactly which version of the
Driver you are using: eg 9.0.2.8, 10.1.0.5.0, 10.2.0.2.0 etc. You can
download the latest drivers for Oracle 9 and 10, here:
[url]http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/tech/windows/odbc/index.html[/url]
For best Vista compatibility, you'd want to run the latest appropriate
version of the driver.

To get more precise information about the error, run an ODBC trace while you
reproduce the problem in Access:
- run ODBC Administrator;
- select the Tracing tab;
- check the "Machine Wide tracing for all user identities, if you run Access
as a different user;
- specify a log file location if you like, or accept the default;
- press Start Tracing now button
- alt-tab to Access, reproduce your failed ODBC call to Oracle;
- observe the point of failure;
- alt-tab back to ODBC Administrator
- press Stop Tracing Now button.

Now examine the resulting log file. It's a plain text file and ca be opened
with Notepad etc. Typically you will find some specific ODBC call which has
failed. You may see messages like "SQLSTATE 08004". Any SQLSTATE other than
00000 is an error. There could be other error messages as well. Even if the
error codes don't mean much to you, they'll mean a lot to an ODBC expert. An
ODBC call could fail in thousands of different ways, so you want to narrow
down the scope of the problem as much as possible.

Hope this helps a bit,
--
Andrew McLaren
amclar (at) optusnet dot com dot au