After nearly a whole day of panic and frantic efforts to find a solution
to this problem, I finally had decided to restore NetBackup 3.1.1 and do
the upgrade to 3.2 some other day. When I called my DBA to let her know
what I was about to do and WHY, she said, "So that's why my purge of the
Oracle catalog database kept failing all day." It seems that the purge
also purged the entries from the NetBackup database spawning a bpdbm
process for each entry (numbers in the 10s of thousands for each Oracle
database).
Needless to say, they won't be trying that again anytime soon!!!!