Oracle errors: ORA-12154: TNS:could not resolve service name - Parenthesis problem

Firstly, happy new year to everyone.  I can't believe I've not written anything here since August.

Anyways, as a great start to my new year, I have been trying to run a console application that connects to an Oracle database but I keep getting the ORA-12154: TNS:could not resolve service name error.  Nothing had changed in my tnsnames.ora file and when I ran the console application from an older archived branch it would connect fine.

I could also connect fine through Toad, so there was definitely nothing wrong with the tnsnames.ora file.  I even checked access permissions on the local folder so make sure that my app had the rights to that folder.  And it was all 100% ok. 

After about a day of debugging connection code and trying to see where the Oracle drivers somehow got corrupted, I had an idea...

Here is the folder structure on my local machine where the EXE file resided:  (Notice the parenthesis)

D:\SourceCode\Development\5674 - Online TV Guide 1(b)\Source\TVGuideImporter\bin\Debug

When I renamed the folder and removed the parenthesis, it worked. So my folder is now:

D:\SourceCode\Development\5674 - Online TV Guide 1b\Source\TVGuideImporter\bin\Debug

Apparently, Oracle doesn't like any access to tnsnames.ora from within a folder structure that contains parenthesis.  I mean that is obvious from the error message not so?  ;)

After I found the solution, I did some Google work and came across this blog post explaining the same thing:

http://joeydotnet.com/blog/archive/2007/01.aspx

I hope someone else finds this post useful.