Alright gurus, here is the million dollar question. It seems that XPSP2 (the one we should have waited for the service pack on). In it is version 7 of the msvcrt.dll which is just lovely UNLESS you are running Oracle and the Java client, in which case you NEED version 6 - which is provided with the JVM and a half dozen other programs. How do you get XP to unload the offesive (SP2) .dll and use the correct (v.6) .dll.
And don't tell me that the option is to switch to SQLServer...