[jdom-interest] String index out of range in Beta 7

[Cyrus Kalbrener]

JDOM: Beta 7
Xerces: 1.2.0

We are building a high-volume transactional system using JDOM and Xerces.
When parsing XML documents, we are frequently seeing the following:

org.jdom.JDOMException: Error in building: String index out of range: -37
        at org.jdom.input.SAXBuilder.build(SAXBuilder.java:306)
        at org.jdom.input.SAXBuilder.build(SAXBuilder.java:650)
        ...
Root cause: org.xml.sax.SAXException: String index out of range: -37
        at org.apache.xerces.framework.XMLParser.parse(XMLParser.java:917)
        at org.jdom.input.SAXBuilder.build(SAXBuilder.java:287)
        at org.jdom.input.SAXBuilder.build(SAXBuilder.java:650)
        ...

This particular exception occurs when there is no PUBLIC id in the DOCTYPE
element, however it also occurs at what seems to be random intervals and in
unpredictable ways. Looking through the e-mail archives I have seen this
brought up a couple of times, but never resolved.  It is becoming a serious
problem.  How can we avoid this?