EBS 12.2 -- Password Change / Special Characters / FNDCPASS and all that.

If you change the APPS password to something with special characters in it by the wrong way, you may encounter "ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied" errors, almost in anything that touches the EBS DB. 

Here is an example thread in my forum : http://erman-arslan-s-oracle-forum.124.s1.nabble.com/db-connection-error-after-APPS-password-change-td12919.html

Note that, using the FNDCPASS utility to change the passwords of database users such as APPS , APPLSYS, GL etc to include special characters is NOT supported. I haven't tried it but I think the same goes for AFPASSWD (enhanced version of FNDCPASS).

However; you may use FNDCPASS to change an application user password (such as SYSADMIN's password)  to a value with specials characters. But! if you want to do that, you may need to use quotation marks.

Here is an example:

FNDCPASS apps/apps 0 Y system/manager USER SYSADMIN '$welcome1'

Note that, for some special characters, you don't need to use quotation marks.. This is by design..

Check the MOS note given below for supported special characters in application user passwords and the requirement of quotation marks in case of using them with FNDCPASS.

R12: How to change passwords to include special characters using FNDCPASS? (Doc ID 1336479.1)