I found the answer on suns dev con. the call to request.getContentLength() was the root of the evil. I am not sure why this call was screwing things up but the solution is:
if the value returned by request.getContentLength() is to big you need to get the
servlet input stream and "flush" it like this
where theLength is the value from
then you can use the request object w/ no weirdness
[This message has been edited by Paul Wetzel (edited September 18, 2000).]