Thanks for the correction! You were 100% correct that the Provider class and ProviderManager were key to the problem, and I'm also a little embarrassed that I missed that. I was trying to avoid any complications on a quick little app, and simply wanted to catch and parse the incoming steam in a single callback.
The javadocs are not 100% clear about the purpose of the "Provider" concept, and even the quickstart docs seem to bypass discussion about their intended purpose and importance. Please correct my interpretation if it's incorrect.
Using terms that I recognize better, The ProviderManager is really a "Stream to packet Factory", with each implementation of 'xxProvider' being the 'factory method' on an incoming sequence of characters. The parsing of the XML to Packets has been decoupled from the actual handling of the packets, which I assume now is handled on a separate thread to keep the stream handling responsive. What I was attempting to do was parse and handle in a single operation.
Thanks again.