Situation: You're running Forms 9i/10g on the web. A PC client, trying to run forms for the first time, is receiving an error message saying "Can't run 16-bit Windows program" and the message refers to not being able to find the setup.exe file when trying to install Oracle JInitiator. Installation of Oracle JInitiator is a required one-time process when using forms on the web.

Solution: Copy the jinit.exe file to c:\temp, then right-click the file instead of double-clicking it to run it. Select WinZip on the popup menu, and extract the file to a known, good location on the problem PC (e.g., c:\temp). The extraction will create a directory named disk1. Inside disk1, you'll see the setup.exe file. Run/double-click that file and Oracle JInitiator will successfully install on the PC.

You can get jinit.exe from OTN (http://otn.oracle.com/software/produ...rms/index.html) or from ORACLE_HOME/jinit on the machine acting as the application server. The version which comes with 10g (9.0.4) Forms and Reports Services is 1.3.1.13, and the (current) OTN download version is 1.3.1.9.