At your suggestion, I tried this:

SELECT TOP 100 * FROM ORALINK..CATALOG.ORATABLE --SUCCEEDS

SELECT TOP 101 * FROM ORALINK..CATALOG.ORATABLE --FAILS

Alas, same issue. This is really strange. May have to revive experiments with MSDAORA.1 again, which was giving us a completely different set of error msgs. It just can't be that hard to pull data from Oracle into SQL 2005!

Thanks for your suggestion...