problem self-referencing using document('') to reference parameters

Ok, so I'm doing some crazy self-referential stuff from within an XSL
stylesheet, it actually doesn't surprise me that I've broken the
XSLProcessor object......   When you call "setParameter", the
parameter seems to get set right; that is, any reference to the
parameter will display the updated value correctly. However,  if you
make a reference to that same parameter from within the XSL document
(using  document('') ) you will get the default value and, as far as I
can tell, you will be unable to self-reference any parameter and get
the non-default value.

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
version="1.0">
<xsl:output method="html" version="4.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"
indent="yes"/>
<xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

<xsl:param name="test" select="'test1'"/>
<!-- default value = 'test1' -->

<xsl:template match="/">

<xsl:value-of select="document('')//xsl:param[@name='test']/@select" /
>
<!-- spit out whatever is in the select attribute of the param named
'test' within this document,
 ... will ALWAYS return 'test1' in gecko -->

<xsl:value-of select="$test" />
<!-- will return 'test1', unless set with setParameter (or by setting
parameters any other way)
 then it will be whatever it was set to -->

</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

The thing that makes me incredibly sad about this is that I developed
my code in IE   (make it work in IE, gecko never fails -- that's my
moto)  and sure enough, I can get it to work in IE -- just not in
gecko.

Sooo  in trying to get this to work, I removed the usage of the
XSLTProcessor.setParameter function and went straight to the XML
source of the XSL file and set the parameter there... e.g.

function setParam( param, value ) {
  xsl.documentElement.selectSingleNode("//xsl:param[@name='"+param+"']/
@select").nodeValue="'"+value+"'";
}  -- of course i needed to grab my handy prototyped selectSingleNode
function to try that out

So after trying this call:
setParam( "test", "test2");

the alert of the XML source prior to translation clearly shows:
 <xsl:param name="test" select="'test2'"/>

BUT the:   <xsl:value-of select="document('')//xsl:param/
[@name='test']/@select" />
inside the for loop STILL returned the default value of 'test1' !

A bug?  By design?  Bug by pushing limits of the design?  who knows...
 it's probably a bad idea to do self-referential stuff anyway.