In trying to reverse-engineer your code, it looks to me as if you are doing
a classic "group-adjacent" problem, where a group of adjacent row elements
are wrapped in a table element. In XSLT 2.0 the most efficient way to do
this should be <xsl:for-each-group group-adjacent="boolean(self::row)">. In
1.0 the most efficient would probably be sibling-recursion

 <xsl:template match="@* | node()">
   <xsl:copy>
     <xsl:apply-templates select="@*"/>
     <xsl:apply-templates select="node()[1]"/>
   </xsl:copy>
   <xsl:apply-templates select="following-sibling::node()[1]"/>
 </xsl:template>

 <xsl:template match="row">
		<table>
			<xsl:apply-templates select="." mode="copy"/>
		</table>
		<xsl:apply-templates select="following-sibling::*[not(self::row)][1]"/>
 </xsl:template>

 <xsl:template match="row" mode="copy">
		<xsl:copy-of select="."/>
		<xsl:apply-templates select="following-sibling::*[1][self::row]" mode="copy"/>
 </xsl:template>

cheers
andrew
--
http://andrewjwelch.com