You might want to see if the "-Xss" option is supported by your JVM. If so, you might want to try setting it to a value of 512k (default is 256k under 32-bit Windows and Unix) and see if that does anything (other than make you sit longer until your StackOverflowException). Note that this is a per-thread setting, so if you've got a lot of threads running you also might want to bump up your heap settings.
