In the comments here, I have a number of people telling me to uninstall Oracle stuff and move on from there. Well, here's the thing - I actually use the Oracle tools (my Smalltalk source code repository is an Oracle DB on my Linux box). So, suggestions that I start yanking software I actually need out will not be taken seriously.

In contrast, let me explain something - I have VW 2.5, 2.5.1, 2.5.2, 3.1, 7.1, 7.2.1, 7.3, 7.3.1, and 7.4 all installed on this system. None of them interfere with any of the others. And yet, I'm being told that to get Java to work I have to yank out an installation that is (or should be) unrelated to what I'm doing?

Please. If Java is that brittle, then I'm simply too busy to be bothered. Maybe I'll try installing some of this stuff on my Mac after I upgrade the memory (256 is all it has at present, and that's not going to be enough with the heft of these tools).