Are you doing the TNSPING on that machine or a client machine? If it is a client machine, is the tnsnames.ora up do date with the correct information, IP of the server that the Oracle is listening on?

Often I've seen this error caused by machines with 2 NIC's where the listener is listening on one IP and the tnsnames.ora is pointing to the hostname of the machine (which is not the correct IP for the listener).

And does anyone know how to turn of the centering for all these messages?