oracle 10G for windows, strange PATH problem leading to wrong executable versions

Hi all,
I installed 10g (along with the cd companion) on a machine with 9i and 8i as well and I encountered a strange problem with PATH variable. As suggested in a README I installed the companion CD stuff in a separate oracle home and as a result I had a lot of stuff in the PATH variable prior to the path to the 10G bin directory. Now, apparently everything was ok, I visually checked the order of the paths and the 10g bin directory was the first to appear in the list. Nevertheless issuing sqlplus from the command line started version 9.2.
Of course calling the command with its full path name worked correctly, so I thought, it must have been a PATH setting. Then I went to the Universal Installer of 10G and changed the order of the oracle homes from the "Environment" tab, promoting 10g as the first one in list (it was the second because I installed the cd companion stuff, as I said).
After doing this operation sqlplus version 10g was invoked correctly.

So, assuming I overlooked something when manually checking the path list the first time, I still wonder what may have caused this because I didn't tamper with PATH since I installed 10g and I was also using a newly created user account with no custom environment settings.

Has anyone else run into this problem?

Bye,
Flavio Received on Sun Jul 18 2004 - 16:25:41 CDT