I re-tried with Saxon9 and the parser with that release worked.  Additionally,
it (actually, the newer transformer) informed me I had a illegal "encoding" 
attribute in my stylesheet.  After removing the bad attribute, I went
back to 6.5.5, but the parser issue with that release remained.  I am
happy with just using saxon9, so issue solved - thanks again.

   -Chris Wolf

Michael Kay wrote:
>> It worked as in the command line tools - both xalan and 
>> saxon.  Although, as mentioned in the last email, in order to 
>> use saxon, I have to use xerces as the parser.
> 
> I'm not aware of any issues with the aelfred parser incorporated in Saxon
> 6.5.5 that could cause this, but I'm not going to worry about it - it's a
> very old product. One possibility is byte-order-marks: these have become
> more common over the years and early parsers didn't permit them. Generally I
> advise people nowadays to use Saxon 9.x even if their stylesheets don't need
> any XSLT 2.0 facilities.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Michael Kay
> http://www.saxonica.com/
> http://twitter.com/michaelhkay