Getting Oracle XE on Windows with Virtual PC to work

Pretty much every time I have installed Oracle XE on Windows without taking any preparatory steps, I have had:

• the home page go "page not found"
• "shared memory realm does not exist" errors in sqlplus
• port 8080 failed to come up in lsnrctl status/netstat -an find "TCP"
• inaccessible Oracle odbc dsns with "tns:no listener" errors

My main preparation steps before installing XE on a Windows VPC:

1. Install the Microsoft Loopback Adapter
2. Use a static IP address
3. Disable all other networking

If this doesn't get it working, forget about checking whether the services are up - they will be.

Instead open up a command prompt and enter the following:

sqlplus / as sysdba
startup;

And this gets rid of the various problems I experience. This is in no way comprehensive. Oracle seems to be happy to leave their customers to trawl google for laundry lists of symptoms and fixes compiled by various bloggers and tweakers.

This isn't a bad article (though not specific to XE).
http://www.dba-oracle.com/oracle9iAS_tips_windows_service.htm
Neither is this
http://psst0101.wordpress.com/2007/06/13/getting-oracle-10201-to-start-automatically/