XBee Shield + GPS Shield = Gibberish?

Hi all,

I’m relatively new to Arduino, and I am trying to get a project up and running using an Uno board, a (SparkFun) XBee and GPS shield. I’m using an XBee series 1 and an EM-406a. The XBee communicates to my computer using the SparkFun USB Explorer board over digital ports 1 and 2 (uart). My GPS is set to dline and I have it communicating over ports 2 and 3 using the newsoftserial library.

My program for the Arduino works fine if I connect to the board over USB or if I have the XBee shield stacked directly on top of the Uno. But, I’d like to put the XBee shield on top of the GPS shield so that I can easily switch the XBee off uart to program the Arduino. But, if I stack the shields like that, after the 3rd command I send to the Arduino from my computer, I get never ending gibberish in the terminal that vaguely resembles what it should output.

Anyone know what’s going on here? It doesn’t make sense that the order I stack the shields in should drastically alter the way my project works, does it? Thanks all!