Problem with PA... "ORA-1801"

1. WHen ISS Norway started in earnest on the PA-implementation today... a problem showed up that was quite bizarre...
They got a number of spurious errors all relating to "ORA-1801: DATE FORMAT IS TOO LONG FOR INTERNAL BUFFER"
The fix according to a number of entries on Metalink were to apply patch 3944226(which is an RDBMS patch)