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I have never been able to reproduce this error before when another customer described it, but when the customer upgraded the Oracle client software to the latest ODBC driver or OLE-DB provider, the problem went away. I think that they used ODBC instead of the OLE-DB Provider. You should be able to use version 8 or 9 client software on a client system to communicate to a 8 server. I have tested are 8.1.7.6.0 ODBC driver and the 8.1.7.2.0 OLE-DB driver that you can get from Oracles web site.
Scott Richardso (NI)
Scott Richardson
https://testeract.com