[R-sig-Geo] grts design call ends in "c function areaIntersection" error

[Alexander.Herr at csiro.au]

Hi List,
I am running into the following error using grts {spsurvey} using a multipolygon shapefile (34 strata) with the following call

stratsites<-grts(design=theList, 
 shift.grid=TRUE,
 DesignID="STRATIFIED",
 type.frame="area", 
 #src.frame="sp.object", 
 #sp.object=pl5, 
 src.frame="shapefile",
 in.shape=fname,
 att.frame=att,
 stratum="layer", 
 shapefile=TRUE, 
 out.shape='Rec_stratified_v03'
)

After some strata information output, I get:

Error: Allocating memory in C function areaIntersection.
Error: In C function areaIntersection.
Error in grtsarea(in.shape, sframe, sum(n.desired), SiteBegin, shift.grid,  : 
  
An error occured while determining the number of levels for hierarchical 
randomization.

If I run with shift.grid=FALSE, I get results. Happy to provide detailed data and script individually...

Using R 3.1.1 on hpc linux with 128gig Ram

Any suggetions? 
Thanks
Herry