[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by sambavan [/i]
[B]On such cases, there seems to be some kind of lock being held on the table that prevents the user from looking into it. When he reconnects, it sees to get resetted. This would be my assumption. Other thing would be that you might not have the parallel querry option on this table.

Hope this would shed some light.
Sam [/B][/QUOTE]

AFAIK in Oracle there is no way any kind of lock could prevent users to read the locked table. "Readers newer block writers, writers never block readers..." is Oracle's well known sintagma.

So you'd better not look in that dirrection, the problem must be somewhere else.