orafad and PavanG,
First let me thank you both for your multiple attempts to help me. I finally figured out what was causing the issue with the Oracle Installer, oui.exe not running properly. Last night I was looking around into the Windows Event Viewer and found an Error entry for oui.exe that pointed to a program directory and .dll in the \\program files\appsense\ directory path. It seems that in addition to the McAfee virus scan, host intrusion, unwanted programs, group policy manager, etc., there is another application installed on the machine that governs what programs can and cannot run. I don't know much about it other than when the program was temporarily suspended, the setup.exe and oui.exe install kicked off fine without the "oui.exe stopped working" error message. It proceeded happily to the Oracle Client installation dialog. All along our IT desktop support was trying to help me with the install and they repeatedly disabled the McAfee programs to no avail, but not the other utilities. It was almost like even they were unaware of this other application running in the background since they never suggested disabling it.
Either way, I'm happy to say that I am now able to successfully launch the Oracle Client installer without issue. I've also learned a little about getting the Oracle 11g Instant client to work with Toad while I worked through the issue with the installer. I could almost get by completely with just using the Instant Client if I didn't have to use SQL*Loader (sqlldr.exe) and tnsping.exe. Any suggestions for getting these two functions to work with the Instant Client would be appreciated. I tried copying the binaries and the message files into the appropriate instant client directories, but windows kept complaining about missing .dll's when I tried executing the commands.
If there is no workaround for getting these functions to work with the Instant Client, and I have to do an Oracle Client install, at least now I can. Do you know if I would need to do the full "Administrator" install to get these functions, or can I do just the "Run Time" install to get sqlldr and tnsping?
Thanks again for your help