I think my preferred fix would be to silence the warning. TeX isn't just being randomly weird. It's giving the warnings because the output is noticeably ugly -- either overflowing the margins (for overfull boxes) or having a really spaced out line (for underfull boxes). I already relax the defaults for these warnings to eliminate them for cases that aren't really so bad. Of course, if you don't care about these niceties for the printed manual (which I can empathize with, believe me), then fine.
If you want to get rid of them forever: @tex \global\hfuzz=\maxdimen \global\hbadness=10000 @end tex Anyway, thanks for the debugging on the @item madness. I'll see if a more comprehensible error message can be given. I hope makeinfo gave a decent error; in general, when TeX is being weird, it's a good idea to run makeinfo. It can detect lots of errors that texinfo.tex can't. karl
