[Clyde Schechter]

While your question resembles the original thread in that both refer to multi-level models, the topic of the thread is clearly about non-convergence--which is not your issue. People sometimes search the forum for specific topics, so it is important to keep threads on their original topic. Somebody searching non-convergence will be wasting their time reading answers to this question. Somebody searching on one of the issues you actually are raising will be unable to find it! So please start a new thread for this by posting it as a New Topic.