I appreciate the advise, but it's a .NET 1.1 app I'm maintaining. I
can't re-write it in the time constraints I have, I just need to add
in a new export type. What strikes me as strange is that we have other
style sheets that produce tab delimited text, or csv, with the same
amount of data but don't have the performance issues of this xsl.

<xsl:stylesheet
	xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
	version="1.0">
<xsl:output method="text" indent="no"/>
<xsl:variable name="delimiter" select="'	'"/>
<xsl:variable name="delimiterReplacement" select="'    '"/>
<xsl:variable name="poundsign" select="'_x0023_'"/>
<xsl:variable name="EOL" select="'
'"/>

<xsl:template match="/">
	<xsl:for-each select="/*/*[position()=1]">
		<xsl:for-each select="*">
			<xsl:choose>
				<xsl:when test="contains(name(.), $poundsign)">
					<xsl:value-of select="concat(substring-before(translate(name(.),
$poundsign, '#'), '##'), '#', substring-after(translate(name(.),
$poundsign, '#'), '##'))"/>
				</xsl:when>
				<xsl:otherwise>
					<xsl:value-of select="name(.)"/>
				</xsl:otherwise>
			</xsl:choose>
			<xsl:if test="not(position() = last())">
				<xsl:value-of select="$delimiter"/>
			</xsl:if>
		</xsl:for-each>
	</xsl:for-each>
	<xsl:value-of select="$EOL"/>
	<xsl:for-each select="/*/*">
		<xsl:for-each select="*">
			<xsl:value-of select="translate(translate(., $EOL, ' '),
$delimiter, $delimiterReplacement)"/>
			<xsl:if test="not(position() = last())">
				<xsl:value-of select="$delimiter"/>
			</xsl:if>
		</xsl:for-each>
		<xsl:value-of select="$EOL"/>
	</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

I'm just trying to figure out how to do something similiar but with a
different target format.