Ora-00164: Autonomous and Distributed transactions

Hi,
we encounter an ora-00164 in a procedure using an autonomous transaction.
RDBMS: Oracle 8.1.7.4
OS: Solaris 2.8 on an ULTRA Sparc (64Bit)

I searched metalink and detected the reason as a db-link to a financial database.
We only select tables of the remote db, no DML. The issue is filed as a bug and resolved in Oracle 9.2

Question: Is there a workaround for using autonomous  transactions and read-only db-links in Oracle 8.1.7.4 (e.g. setting distributed_transactions = 0 in initSID.ora)?

-- 
Frank Piron,
defrankatkonaddot
(leftrotate two)