Re: profiles

Your particular parallel query of degree 8 will attempt to instantiate 8 sessions under the id you are signed on as (and quit possibly 16 sessions). Since your profile sessions_per_user is limited to 1, you receive an error that you've exceeded your maximum session limit. This is something, as far as I know, that isn't documented in the Oracle 7.1 RDBMS Server Addendum.
If you query the v$session table while a parallelized query is running, you'll
be able to confirm for yourself that this is the case. Better yet, if you combine the v$session query with the v$sqlarea table you'll be able to see exactly how the query coordinator has partitioned your query. This is probably the reason Oracle changed their licensing from per user session to per named user. What I would do, unless someone has a better idea is to change the users profile to sessions_per_user unlimited, since any parallel query can actual have twice the number of query server processes running as specified by the table's definition or, as you did, specified by using a HINT in the select clause.  

Hope this helps. Dennis Buddenborg

                               DBA
                               Kelly Services, Inc.