Oracle E-Business Suite: Help, My Page Looks Funny!

This last week we had a scheduled patch window after validating a round of patches for our Oracle E-Business Suite infrastructure.  We had our Super User team run through their gambit of tests (minimum was primary/critical functions/processes, and encouraged as much testing as possible).

Something that was not caught in this week's testing was an issue with page rendering.  Our non-production instance we think changes often enough (clones, etc), and most users access it so infrequently, that the user's PC's don't cache the page very often if at all.  Production though, showed some ugly behavior:

As you can see from a testing VM - the page doesn't look quite right.

A quick hit of the refresh button, and the page renders normally.  But, this obviously shouldn't be hitting our users.

On my own PC, our consultant's PC's - we couldn't replicate the issue.  I remembered an old issue with a vendor's website from years ago at a previous company, and we had to push out an Internet Explorer setting change to all users.

Changing how IE checked for new page versions to "Every time I visit the webpage" solved the issue then, and we've confirmed for us it's solved our user's troubles as well.  We think it's because the local PC is caching a copy of the CSS file, and a patch updated/changed it.  We'll be pushing this setting out to everyone via Group Policy in the near future.

Thought I might post this out there for folks who run into similar trouble.

SQL Server 2005 Express on Windows XP

So, I don't know how many people out there have run into this, but this is the second time I've bounced my head against my desk trying to figure this out.

So, I'm trying to install Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 Express with the advanced management package. Shouldn't be any big deal, I've done it before, no fuss right?

Well, yea, if there was no fuss I wouldn't be writing would I?

So, I install, and a bunch of errors come up after running the install (my choices were to use the advanced install options, use mixed authentication, and to install all the optional components on a fresh, base Windows XP VMWare setup with all the latest and greatest Windows updates and such. The first error I see pop up is that the SQL Native Client didn't install properly, and that I should find a new copy of 'sqlncli.msi' and try again. I think to myself, 'I don't have that file, it's all in the 'SQLEXPR_ADV.exe' that I got from Microsoft's site.' So, I reboot, try again. Same issue.

At this point I realize I'm dumb, and look at the log files and the event viewer. Not much help there, except to tell me once more that I need to find a new copy of the sqlncli.msi file and try again. Oie.

So, Google that file, find a download from Microsoft (here), and install the Native Client, then install the rest of the Express Server. Run the install, get prompted that I'm installing a newer version that what is currently there (um, sure, why not!), and all goes well. So, reboot again, then run the SQLEXPR_ADV.exe and wouldn't you know it, it works! I didn't see many useful articles on Microsoft's side on the issue, but I do know that this work around did solve my problem, and hopefully, will help you