OK are you ready for the question of the week?
I did some mods to the init.ora for our production DB last fri night. But looking in instance manager I found that the changes I made the week before werent showing up anymore, I had changed the shared_pool_size from 18mb to 28mb, then checked it after i restarted and all was cool, then I happened to look in instance mgr the other day and found it was back to 18mb which led me to believe that the box was rebooted and they have the db set to start on reboot pointing to a diff init.ora. Sure enough I traced a few files with the sysadm and it was pointing to a different init.ora when its restarted. Now I looked in the init.ora they were usiing and everything looks the same EXCEPT this line..
"nls_date_format = "DD-MON-RR" # 1/6/00 JLC to handle Y2K"

without that in what is the date format my DB is using, and is this a biggggg boo boo???