Do you really want the database in ISO-8859-1 encoding instead of UTF-8? The latter is recommended throughout for OpenACS use and gives you a lot more flexibility, especially should you ever have users that use other character sets than iso-8859-1.
Also I wonder if this:
export NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.WE8ISO8859P1
is a good idea. According to these excellent installation instructions: http://archive.greenpeace.org/~bruno/oracle.html it breaks the date formatting. You might want to try to change it to export NLS_LANG=.WE8ISO8859P1 and make sure that it really affects the nsd process. E.g. try starting aolserver from the commandline like this:
$ NLS_LANG=.WE8ISO8859P1 nsd -f -t yourconfig.tcl ...
And of course when testing a new configuration always try to insert _and_ read the newly inserted data after the restart. Don't rely on already existing data, it might be wrongly encoded.
