Some background first-
My environment consists of a Windows 7 host machine running a CentOS virtual machine in VMWare with Oracle 11g express edition. The database appears to be installed just fine, and I can connect to the database with SQuirrel running in the VM, with SQLPlus commands, etc.
Now I am also trying to connect to the database via an ASP.NET application running on the Windows host machine (a website set up by IIS). For this data connection I had installed the Oracle data access components for oracle client 11.2.0.3.0 via the Oracle Universal Installer. I did this a few days ago and it worked just fine. However, somehow between now and then something got messed up and I no longer see the data access provider installed.
My quick way of testing this is if I create a dummy udl file, and go to the Data Link Properties page, there is no Oracle OLE DB Provider. However it used to be there! And this was all working. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling the data access components but still the data provider does not show up.
The only thing I can think of that changed between now and then was some messing with the registry under HKLM/Software and HLKM/Software/Wow6432Node. I had to add read/write permissions for the Everyone user in order to do something related to our ASP.NET app, and then I removed those permissions when I was done. I suppose it is possible I messed something up doing that.
So in general how can I troubleshoot this? Reinstalling the data access components does not seem to work. When I go to the Data Link Properties page, where does that list of available data providers come from? How can I verify the registry settings of the Oracle data access client installation?
Thanks,
Rich