A followup to you your comment about

"Generally, if we run into a situation where the XML is used in more than a single statement, we load the data into a temp table and close the document as soon as possible before doing more processing"

It is  CRITICALLY important to do this. There is actually a bug in OpenXML that will cause you to get unexpected crashes when you use the OpenXML over and over.  It might not bite you every time, but I've had first hand experience with it.

We had an application that we used OpenXml with in testing. The stored proceedure had been finished and had been working for 6 months when one day, the stored proccedure starte crashing for NO reason. - The XML was valid, and had worked the day before, and nothing had changed, but it simply started crashing. A consultant who was working with us, who had worked in the SQL group at Microsoft said that he had seen that before, and to do the OpenXML, get the data into table variables, and close the xml as quickly as possible. We ended up implimenting that change, which was fairly trivial and poof - the problem disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. I seem to recall that the root of the problem was a memory leak in the OpenXML code.