I appreciate the feedback BWending - didn't mean to seem like I didn't. I played with the join syntax, didn't seem to make a difference. The DBA had an "Oracle Expert" come out and look at it, and here were his findings:
Queries being executed with connect by prior are having a problem with...
Yesterday I was working on a query to summarize some data. It pulls data from 2 fairly static tables, each containing around 70k rows. As soon as I Executed the query - almost instantly - I got an "End of file on communication channel..." error. That is followed by a "Not connected to Oracle"...