character set weirdness and .NET

I have been searching high and low without success. I have an Oracle 7 DB (stop laughing). I am not the DBA. It is what I have been given to work with. It's NLS_CHARACTERSET from NLS_DATABASEPARAMETERS is AL24UTFFSS. All the text columns are VARCHAR2.
I read the data using OraOleDb.Oracle (the Oracle supplied OleDb provider) into a .NET program I have written. When I run the program on my development machine the text reads and displays properly. I had no idea I had a problem until I go to install it on a client machine and they get all text displayed as vertical bars. One guy even gets Chinese characters. I have built a WinXP environment for testing and it exhibits the problem.

Obviously, the problem is that these other machines don't have some character set file installed on them that I have somehow managed to get installed on mine.

I actually don't care about the character set file. I just want to read text out of the DB. The same text that was loaded into it would be a bonus. How do I make the DB deliver text in a known character set that is easily interpreted?

I will even reload the data with a given character set if I need to just make the pain stop.

Thanks for listening, Greg. Received on Wed Dec 01 2004 - 00:24:42 CST