Getting Toad 9.7 to work on Windows 7 x64

I'm trying to get Toad 9.7 to work on a new installation of Windows 7 x64. I installed a 64-bit Oracle instant client (manually by extracting to a folder and setting some environment variables). Things seemed to be OK (SQL Developer worked, SQL*Plus worked), but Toad was having problems.

I then read that Toad needs a 32-bit client, so I "installed" that using the same method, but it still wasn't happy. It kept giving me an error saying that I didn't have an Oracle client installed. I tried many different things like setting different environme开发者_如何学JAVAnt variables (LD_LIBRARY_PATH, ORACLE_HOME etc.) and nothing worked. I then scrapped the manual method and downloaded the full Oracle client but only checked the "instant client" option when I ran the setup, and that finally worked. Toad recognized the client and I got rid of those env. variables I had set, and only had TNS_ADMIN set, in addition to the oracle home folder in the system path.

There was still one problem. Toad didn't know the version of my oracle client and kept giving me error messages saying that the oracle home was invalid. I could ignore those messages and everything seemed to work, but I just didn't like the fact that the home it was using was coloured red and I had to tell it to ignore those error messages.

So after a little more digging and some guesses on my part, I got a kludge-ey method to work. I copied the oci.dll file into the bin folder under the oracle home, and I also made another copy of that file in the bin folder and called it oraclient11.dll. The combination of those two things got Toad to stop complaining.

However, that doesn't seem like a very clean method, so I was wondering if anyone else has come across this issue and used a cleaner method to get it working.

After you install the 32-bit client by extracting the files, set the PATH to point to the 32-bit directory. And make sure that the 32-bit directory is in the path BEFORE the 64-bit directories.

I think that's what worked for me but I'm not 100% positive.