Thanks Ken, I'll give that a whirl.

I have spotted something odd, Grid Control thinks OPEN_MAX has changed from 1024 to 65536, then to 1024 and then back to 65536 over a period of 3 weeks. The changes tie in with reboots/crashes but sysadmin don't know what causing this and didn't do anything. Yet if i do a getconf OPEN_MAX it returns 1024. It may just be a problem/bug with grid and yes I'm clutching at straws!

We run 3 databases, a couple of agents and grid on this box. We also see the same pattern on the DR server (and that also has the mysterious, ostensibly changing open_max value).

Bazza