I run the HotJava with the following command,

set JDK_HOME=z:\java\jdk1.2fcs\win32
hotjava

It crashed with both promote build and my own build. Inside debugger, I found the following code is repeated with progress.

50439D3B mov edi,ebp
50439D3D mov ebp,dword ptr [ebp]
50439D40 cmp ebp,0FFh
50439D43 je 50439D53
50439D45 cmp dword ptr [ebp+4],50439877h
50439D4C jne 50439D3D
50439D4E cmp dword ptr [ebp+18h],eax
50439D51 jne 50439D3B

There is also another deep recursion on the stack. The code is not very readable.