Multiple instances on Oracle 8i and NT 2000 Server

Is there anyone who knows of a problem with this combination? I had a server Win 2000 NT Server, with an Oracle 8i database up and running.
I created a second instance and a database, took all the necessary steps, and brought it up and running. So far so good. Everything seemed to be fine. Then I had to bring the instance down, which I did in Server Manager, and then it refused to mount and open again. No errors, it just didn't respond. I tried to stop and restart the service, even reboot the server: nothing worked. I could find no problems in LISTENER.ORA, TNSNAMES.ORA, SQLNET.ORA or INIT.ORA.
The Event Logger of NT only showed a warning that the service didn't start, but without specification.
In fact, I even deleted the database and the instance and created it again from scratch: same problem.

On another server there have been problems with some sort of automatic timeout. I connect remote to the database, but after some time of inactivity the connection is lost. This causes an Internet application (that works with ODBC) to fail. Even on the server that holds the Internet server and the database I cannot start the Internet application. Except when I reboot the server: then everything works fine for a short time.

What could be the possible causes for these problems? Any suggestions are welcome.

TIA, Henk Hultink

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H. Hultink
Software Engineer
Stoas, Division OBOI
Wageningen, The Netherlands
"Activating Knowledge"
http://www.stoas.nl

e-mail: hhu_at_stopspam.stoas.nl