Help with Query Tuning
This is the offending code causing your query to take hours to return results:

           and not exists (
                        select null 
                        from pa q
                        where q.PROJect_NBR = p.project_nbr 
                          and q.status &lt;&gt; p.status 
                          and q.aud_timestamp &lt; p.aud_timestamp 
                          and q.aud_timestamp &gt; a.aud_timestamp
                           )


You should really convert that to a join instead, because as it stands you are generating a new lookup for each record in the 2million source rows.