ORA-04068 - Existing State Of Packages Has Been Discarded

We are experiencing an issue with ORA-04068: existing state of packages has been discarded. We're running Oracle 10.2.0.4 on Solaris 10.

I'll provide the timeline of what occurred:

1.) Last night during a maintenance window I recompiled a package and package body. I ran "create or replace" statements from a script via sqlplus to recompile both package and package body. Because I am required to do all DDL under my own login (and not the schema owner login) the scripts require that the schema name be included in the "create or replace" statements. Otherwise an object will be incorrectly created in my schema. This is what happened with the package body. I discovered this when the package body would not compile.

2.) I ran a "drop package body" statement to drop the package body from MY schema.

3.) I added the proper schema name to the script and recompiled both the spec and body under the proper schema.

4.) I ran a script to check for any invalid objects under the application user schema. There were none.

5.) During the night a batch process ran which executed the package. There were several failures with the error ORA-04068: existing state of packages has been discarded.

6.) During the early AM today the error stopped. Not knowing this at the time and believing that the issue was still occurring I began searching the internet for information regarding this issue. One site I found said this could be due to DDL being done on the object (which was the case for us) and there could be an entry in the shared pool marked as invalid which our application's session may be accessing. It recommended running "alter package recompile" for the spec and body. I did this but it seems to have triggered the event again.

I also ran utlrp.sql.

I found some information suggesting the use of DBMS_SESSION.MODIFY_PACKAGE_STATE and/or RESET_PACKAGE but I'm not seeing mention of the risks/implications.

I can verify that the object is no longer in my schema and that the proper object owner has no invalid objects. I am not sure what to do to resolve the issue or keep it from occurring again.