Wish I could change the title of this thread now! Under orders from my supervisor, I stopped the database from services and killed the db to reinstall a fresh. Ran our scripts to build the bare bones shell of our db but nothing else and attempted to tnsping from our client which we knew to work 1st time round but got error saying there was no listner service. Checked services and although the db listner service (not replication one) was set to Automatic, it hadn't started and failed to start manually saying "Error 2140: An internal Windows NT error occured" - naturally, tnsping from server to its own db doesn't work either. I have a feeling I may have to re-build the server from scratch if daniweb users don't turn up any solutions, which may not be all bad as I can get an image of a pre-db server off a colleague who I'm working alongside.