Just to be clear on this - in order for my stylesheet to work properly,
I MUST use Saxon-9.  The Xalan baked into the Sun JDK-1.5.0_16, i.e.:
"com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.TransformerFactoryImpl"
does NOT seem to handle the "preceding::" axis properly.

This has been observed by others:

http://www.opensubscriber.com/message/fop-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/316331.html
(this remark is not for xalan, specifically, but I'm seeing the symptom as described)

Thanks for a great product!

 -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