Tim - I saw this too a couple of weeks back and we're currently evaluating what impact this has (near term) as well as out in the future... A while back I'd tried multi purposing the dataprovider to work with both MS client as well as ODP but ran into versioning issues (this was a while back) as well as the memory leak issue with ODP.NET. It was then decided to not move forward on the ODP side since it required some rethinking of the provider in general. I have not tried this recently with the 11g versions of ODP.NET but hopefully in the coming weeks/months should have something under way...

Sanjay