DOCBOOK-APPS: TeX capacity exceeded - final word?

Tom Colby here with a  problem that others appear to have had,
but for
which I haven't seen a solution yet.
I'm using docbook 3.1 with dsssl 1.72 stylesheets and
openjade1.3/jadetex 3.11 to process a relatively big book and I get the
"TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [grouping levels=255]" when I try to
create a printable version with jadetex.
HTML works fine (although I use the 1.58 stylesheets for that)

With openjade I can produce an ~ 650 page document directly in rtf, but
I'd like TeX version in order to handle my
cross-refs.

All I ever get are monstrous dvi files that only appear to contain the
ToC. The .tex output contains other things, but I can't see it.
When I shut off the ToC generation at the docbook level, my .dvi file
contains only a couple blank pages (but it's still huge, and the error
is the same).


I've set just about everything I could in the texmf.cnf really high and
re-made jadetex.
I'm lost,
Is there a solution?

Tom