Oracle on Windows Authentication Woes (And Solutions)

For my current project, I need to have my own development Oracle instance. Instead of carving out space on one of the servers, I figured it's a good time to just bite the bullet and install Oracle XE on my desktop (Windows XP). For the most part, it has been a fairly painless experience.

Except that several times already, when trying to run imports or simply connecting via SQL-Plus, I get the following crap:

C:\oraclexe\app\oracle\product\10.2.0\server\BIN>sqlplus XXXXXX/XXXXX

SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Mon Mar 17 08:50:29 2008

Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle. All rights reserved.

ERROR:
ORA-12638: Credential retrieval failed

The first time it happened, I simply restarted the OracelServiceXE and OracleXETNSListener services. Then it happened again today, and restarting services had no effect. And I am NOT rebooting my whole machine just to get Oracle to work.

But thanks to someone named "babu george" on this forum, I fixed the issue quite simply by getting rid of NTS authentication.

In your sqlnet.ora file, simply comment out the (NTS) line and create a new line with (NONE) in place of (NTS).

#SQLNET.AUTHENTICATION_SERVICES = (NTS)
SQLNET.AUTHENTICATION_SERVICES = (NONE)

Alas, don't get me started on how much I love Windows.