oci.dll found!

Ok, so after the whole car experience I account for below, I did my errand, and returned to work. I tried to boot up a client I use for viewing tables in Oracle, and was given a message that the oci.dll could not be found. Sure enough, it was in the Oracle folder where it was supposed to be. I had recently uninstalled several apps, including older versions of many programs, so I had to open up the registry for windows to make sure the values were still as they should be. I was thinking it probably wasn't the best idea to be messing around with registry values if my brain was as sharp today as demonstrated earlier.

After about half an hour of checking logs and such, I went to look at the environment variables on my system. I had recently installed Ruby, and for some reason, it was put into my path without a semi-colon. I therefore had PATH c:\rubyc:\oracle\bin;etc..

What the...?? Weird.

Anyway, I put the semi-colon in, and it's fixed now...yay!