Kyle Brown et al: Help with Oracle 08177 error on VAJ/WAS 3.5.3

Does anyone have any experience with this 08177 error when writing clobs to an Oracle db through VAJ/WAS 3.5.4? Basically, I am using a session bean with TX_REQUIRED to encapsulate this logic: Do an insert a table and with one of the columns being an empty_clob() (so that I can get back the clob locator to later insert data into it), then I get back the clob locator and insert data into the empty row I created earlier. At this point I get a java IOException with an Oracle error saying "ora error-08177. Can't serialize this transaction". From looking at the Oracle forums the best I could find was "try the tx again"!!
Kyle Brown, et al, I would greatly appreciate some insight into this.
Thanks.