[ODE] General lack of understanding

[Christoph Beyer]

sounds like a tricky problem
disable bouncing, to improve debugging.
I saw in my own app, that a high soft_cmf value causes objects to 
penetrate eachother more.
try to vary the cmf value or disable cmf by setting 'mode' to 0.

you have to experiment with the surface. ... configuration and choose 
your best values
( if this problem is solved by other values )

christoph