Q. The oracle installer splash screen opens but then closed down with no warning. What's up?
Q. I've heard there are problems running Oracle on P4's, what are they?

I have seen this and variations of this question so many times on the Oracle forums I thought it was time to create a static link to a description of the problem. The problem and it's workaround are so well documented that I do not propose to go into full detail here. Some people on the forums would say that if you can't google for the problem and solution, you probably shouldn't be playing with Oracle. I'll reserve judgement on that one.

DISCLAIMER

• Use the following entirely at your own risk. I accept no responsibility whatsoever for any errors/problems/cold coffee etc which you may encounter as a result of following these instructions

SUMMARY

• The Oracle installer uses the JRE (Java Runtime Environment) as it is written in Java.
• Some versions of the JRE have a CPU detection bug which manifests itself on P4's.
• The JRE shipped on some (but not all) Oracle installation CD's includes the bugged JRE.
• There is a simple workaround.

SOLUTION

• Copy the entire installation CD to a folder on your hard drive somewhere.
• Search for *all* copies of SYMCJIT.DLL on your PC including the folder where you copied the Oracle installation CD.
• Rename every copy of SYMCJIT.DLL to SYMCJIT.OLD or something similar.
• Run the installer from the folder where you copied the installation CD to.

The Oracle installer will now run fine. Post installation you can rename all of SYMCJIT.OLD back to SYMCJIT.DLL as it is not used at all by Oracle once installation is complete. If you do rename it back though, some of the Java based Oracle client tools might not work (DBCA for example) but the Oracle server itself is fine. Personally I just leave the files in the .old state, they're not needed by anything that I know of anyway.

More information from Google