  To systematically describe evaporation spectra for light and heavy compound
nuclei over a large range of excitation energies, it was necessary to consider
three ingredients in the statistical model. Firstly, transmission coefficients
or barrier penetration factors for charged-particle emission are typically
taken from global fits to elastic-scattering data. However, such transmission
coefficients do not reproduce the barrier region of evaporation spectra and
reproduction of the data requires a distributions of Coulomb barriers. This is
possibly associated with large fluctuations in the compound-nucleus shape or
density profile. Secondly for heavy nuclei, an excitation-energy dependent
level-density parameter is required to describe the slope of the exponential
tails of these spectra. The level-density parameter was reduced at larger
temperatures, consistent with the expected fadeout of long-range correlation,
but the strong $A$ dependence of this effect is unexpected. Lastly to describe
the angular-momentum dependence of the level density in light nuclei at large
spins, the macroscopic rotational energy of the nucleus has to be reduced from
the values predicted with the Finite-Range Liquid-Drop model.
