You know this is pretty good comedy between this thread and that Ora-600 thread, the office is getting a pretty good chuckle out of this.

Ok look (Reydp) there is no spfile in 8i only in 9i and above. At the command prompt when the database is down you type in create spfile from pfile. Once that spfile is created Oracle will automatically use that instead of the init.ora. Therefore making it possible to change things dynamically.