I tried to startup Enterprise Manager this morning (in my virtualized copy of XP through Parallels) and was greeted with this error message, followed by another stream of messages, followed by the program crashing. As a programmer, I know what this means, but your average user (even one using SQL Developer Tools) may have no idea what the hell’s going on here. But I’m digressing; this isn’t a rant about Microsoft’s shoddy user experience.

The problem is that I didn’t do anything to these DLLs. The only things I did system-wide since the last time I successfully ran Enterprise Manager was upgrade to Parallels 3.0 and install Dawn of War: Dark Crusade to test out the new DirectX features in Parallels. Neither of these should have screwed around with these libraries!

So, annoyed, I had to reinstall Enterprise Manager to fix it. …except it didn’t fix it. I’m still getting the error message, and it still won’t start, and at that point I was actually starting to become behind on work because of it!

That’s what gets me — on Mac OS X (or, technically, a NeXTSTEP machine or any similar system) any custom libraries would be included in the .app bundle, so I wouldn’t have to worry about randomly corrupting some libraries and a re-install would fix it if it did happen.

So, lazyweb, is there any way to fix this?