I'm not doing recursion in my code. I thought maybe you had it somewhere I missed.
At any rate, I'm now porting the Worker class in an effort to fix the lighting annoyance in the SoftGLRenderer, and I came across a Thread.MAX_PRIORITY-1 assignment. MAX_PRIORITY is 10, NORM_PRIORITY is 5, and MIN_PRIORITY IS 1. So what's 9 about?