Oracle 10g Database Locking Session Issue
You can change distributed_lock_timeout at the instance level alter system set distributed_lock_timeout=&lt;sec&gt; scope=spfile; 
But what you are describing is a session modifiable parameter in 11g called ddl_lock_timeout and I’m not aware of anything that replicates that in 10g. The fact that it runs as expected in one environment and not the other means you might want to pull a list of parameter settings between the two and see what’s different.