Thanks Jeff..

You are right.. My TNS was wrong..

By habit, I put in the IP address when configuring the TNS and I don't have that in my hosts file. When I am pinging to see if i can trace the server on the network, i am pinging with servername instead of IP address.. It's very silly, but with the error code, i got deviated into going through almost every article in metalink and did not see beyond common sense.

yeah, you are genius, sorry super-genius..

Thanks, ST2003..