Depending on what level of Oracle you are using and whether you have row chaining, you may want to use 'compute statistics'. I have recently had errors occur both on 8.0.5.1 and 8.1.5.0 for large tables (over 15 million rows) and small tables with chained rows. The 'estimate statistics' gives a trace file and ends the 'analyze' command but the 'compute statistics' works. It is always better to do the 'compute' anyway, if you have the window.