hey mike,

well, here's a couple of notes. first of all, your os user is in the NT user group ORA_DBA. you can see this by running NT's User Manager (usrmgr.exe). being in this group allows a few things:

1) when running svrmgrl or sqlplus, you can connect as INTERNAL and not get prompted for a password. if you remove yourself from the ORA_DBA group, you will get prompted for a password.

2) when running svrmgrl, you can connect anyone as sysdba! and it doesn't matter what password you type in! try it. connect any user as sysdba and it will connect you without regards to the password you typed. then check to see who you are connected as with:

SELECT username FROM user_users;

and you will see that you are currently connected as SYS, no matter who you try to connect as.

3) when running sqlplus, you can connect anyone as sysdba, but you must know the correct password! after being connected run:

SELECT username FROM user_users;

and you'll see that you are indeed connected as the correct user, but with sysdba privileges.


so anyway, all this was just to say that your passwords were never really messed up, svrmgrl was just not authenticating your user by passwords. in fact, it was just connecting you as INTERNAL whenever you tried to connect as sysdba. and being in the ORA_DBA group allowed you to do this.

sqlplus, on the other hand, doesn't try to connect you as INTERNAL whenever you connect as sysdba. but it does allow you to connect any user as sysdba, as long as the os user is in the ORA_DBA group. i personally never use svrmgrl. sqlplus has all of the same functionalities of svrmgrl; also svrmgrl is no longer existent in 9i (i think). and just a side note...if you want to run sqlplus without prompting you for a username (like svrmgrl does), just type 'sqlplus /nolog' at the command prompt.

so anyway, i don't really have a resolution for all this. but, hopefully this helps with your understanding of the problem. please let me know if there is still something you would like to resolve with this issue.

nick