Removed hard limit on module initialization

[nickbattle]

This is an issue to reflect the changes, with some amendments, in Simon Fraser's PR #772. I will merge this into ncb/development, which will subsequently be picked up by development and master in the next release.

[nickbattle]

Simon's patch was applied, with a small change to force a small number of retries even if the error number does not decrease. This is to protect against the case where N1 errors are produced at one pass, and N2 on the next pass and N1=N2 even though the errors are different. A similar change was also made to class initialization.

[nickbattle]

Change now available in ncb/development.