Oracle Express Edition: Good things come to those who wait

I decided to give XE one last try on Windows before turning to VM Ware. So I uninstalled XE using the MSI program. This did a stand-up job of tidying up everthing which was a relief as it's not an experience I've always had with de-installing Oracle before.

Then I set about tweaking my configuration. About the only problem on the known issues list that I didn't have was an account name with spaces. Here's what I did do:

(1) Control Panel > System > Advanced > Environment

• Remove ActiveState Perl from the PATH variable
  
• Point TEMP and TMP variables at C:\temp instead of the default
  
• Remove the ORACLE_HOME variable (not sure I have this, I think it might break an Ant script)

(2) Stop the Oracle 9i services
(3) Control Panel > Region and Language, change preference to English (US)
(4) Reboot

Then I re-ran the installer and it worked! I now have a nice 10gXE on my work machine. Just in time for the weekend, my wife will be pleased. And my 9i installation isn' t broken either so I'm a happy bunny once more.