Resolving TNS Permision Denied for XE on Windows 7

Question

I am working with Oracle 11g XE on a Win7 laptop. I have had this up and running without issue for more nearly two years. Went about a month without connecting, and the next time I tried to I got “ORA-12546: TNS:permission denied”.

Since I first ran into this about a week ago I have:

• Tried connecting with multiple clients (SQLPlus, PLSQL Developer, DB Forge Studio) all of which report the same error.
• Tried connecting to other instances with the above clients, all seem to be working fine.
• Tried connecting using the full connection descriptor instead of the XE alias.
• Completely removed all oracle clients and installations from my laptop, and reinstalled them. Including cleaning out residual registry entries, as noted here https://superuser.com/questions/256762/how-do-i-completely-remove-oracle-11g.

As far as I can tell, everything seems to have reinstalled correctly in terms of files being where they belong and services running, but I am still getting the same TNS errors.

What should I be looking for at this point?

Answer 1

So I still don't know exactly what caused my issues. But after spending way to much time trying to research it and tweak things, I got it working again. The two items that I believe were most critical to the process were:

Updating/syncing my .ora files. In particular I had some with references to localhost that had to be changed to my full machine name.

Granting my individual user full control on my oracle directory. I found a reference elsewhere that noted that the permissions inherited from a group were not being honored correctly.