Originally posted by bazza
I may be way off the mark here (its been a while since I played with SPfiles) but isn't it possible to corrupt them if you alter a parameter online and do a typo on the parameter value whilst doing it?

Apologies in advance if I'm talking crap.
Think here we are talking about editing the actual file, perfectly possible to corrupt it then

No, not possible to corrupt it using alter system = ... as any invalid parameter wont be written to the file.

although you can make it so your instance doesnt start that way - but the file itself is still valid