Has anyone seen this problem before

Hello all

I have a Windows NT server SP 5 running Oracle 8.0.5 with 7 databases on it

Today one of the databases had a db link that wouldn't work. Getting a TNS-12154 error. So I did the usual tests, logged onto the server and pinged the server it was trying to connect to, tnspinged the database the link was connecting to and used SQL*PLUS to make a connection to the remote database. All these tests work

So I logged onto the trouble database and created a new database link to the same database, and another database, still wouldn't work.

By this time my head was spinning so I logged onto another database on the server and re-created the database link and this time it worked. So I had it narrowed down that there must be something wrong with just the one database so I bounced it hoping to clean up whatever the problem was. Still wouldn't work. Same error

Went to metalink and search for a possible fix but everything led me back to doing the tests I had already done and that had worked.

As a last ditch effort I decided to stop and restart the databases NT service and low and behold this fixed the problem. I checked the event logs and there were no errors that may lead me to the cause of this problem.

So my question is has anyone had this problem before or can anyone shed some light on what may have caused it. My manager wants a reason and she is not going for "Sometimes Oracle on NT is just weird"

Thanks folks, sorry for such a long post