I had a pretty rough week attempting to get the Oracle client installed on my Windows 7 – 64bit machine. I’m going resist the temptation to throw stones, but let’s just say it was a frustrating week.
Today I went to the Server Explorer in Visual Studio 2008 to do some work with the ADO.NET Entity Framework. When attempting to connect the designer to my local SQL Server, I immediately received this
An unexpected error occurred in the Oracle Data Provider for .NET. Please contact the provider vendor to resolve this problem.
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Even though I’ve uninstalled every trace of Oracle from my machine from the Add/Remove Programs dialog, Oracle seems to have failed to cleanup after itself and it’s still left some damaging residue in my registry.
It took a while and some googling to figure this out, but the solution is to find all occurrences of the following GUID in your Windows registry and delete each one. I found about 25 of these. After deleting them all and restarting Visual Studio, it looks like I’m back in business.
D601BB95-E404-4A8E-9F24-5C1A462426CE