For a well-established organisation like Oracle, I can’t believe that they actually let this issue past their QA. As of now, there are still quite a lot of companies worldwide that are using Oracle 9i as they may not have the impetus to upgrade to the latest Oracle database. So, it is not unexpected that the Oracle 9i client will be installed on present-day machines.
When the Oracle 9i client was installed on my notebook, I immediately experienced problems with my Java applications. At first I was wondering if Java was acting up and I restarted my notebook. When the problem persisted, I ran Java app from the system console and found an exception that a particular package could no longer be found! This was strange as I did not change my Java installation.
Turns out that the Oracle 9i client installed an older version of Java in order to operate properly. I do not fault Oracle for this. What I was incredulous about was that they changed the universal PATH settings used by all Windows applications and probably broke a vast majority of modern day Java applications! And we all thought an Oracle is supposed to be all-knowing… (hmm… or did it knowingly break my Java apps???)