limits.conf nproc setting for oracle user not effective

At the moment the oracle user's nproc on one of our servers is:

[oracle@xxxx003cnc ~]$ ulimit -u
16384

According to KB with

[root@xxxx003cnc ~]# sysctl -a | grep threads-max
kernel.threads-max = 256694

so we should be able to get upto 128347 for an nproc value for any user. If I create a new user account from scratch it gets this value when you run ulimit -u.

However if we try to set it for the oracle user in limits.conf its not honored. It is always 16384 no mater what we set there. I can decrease it from the cmd line (ulimit -u 1000 will set it to 1000) but can't increase it to 128347.

current contents of the limits.conf file are:

#* soft core 0
#* hard rss 10000
#@student hard nproc 20
#@faculty soft nproc 20
#@faculty hard nproc 50
#ftp hard nproc 0
#@student - maxlogins 4

#oracle soft nproc 2047
#oracle hard nproc 16384
oracle soft nofile 65536
oracle hard nofile 65536

# End of file
# Disable core dumps
* soft core 0
* hard core 0

Have tried adding directives to set nproc to 128347 but it doesn't work even after a reboot. We're running RHEL5.9.2 . Is it possible that the # is being ignored and still in effect even if the line for oracle's nproc setting is commented out?