Bibtex and figure captions

[Gregory T Reeves]

I have a question about running bibtex when I have certain figure 
captions.  I am running LyX 1.3.4, "BibTeX (Web2C 7.4.5) 0.99c kpathsea 
version 3.4.5". 

Sometimes, when I choose to view->dvi, I don't get any output from 
BibTeX.  I noticed that this happens consistently when my figure 
captions (in figure floats) have too many characters with formatting 
that is not "Normal".  That is, if I choose my font in my figure 
captions to be "smaller", and at the same time have many words with 
"Emphasis On" in my figure caption, then BibTeX will not produce any 
output, and any citation reference appears as [?]. 

If I restore the character size to "Normal", or if I eliminate several 
words with "Emphasis On" from the offending figure caption, BibTeX runs 
fine.  In fact, if I change the paragraph environment in my figure float 
from "Caption" to "Standard", this also fixes the problem.

I searched the mailing list, and I couldn't find any messages with a 
similar problem.  Does anyone know about this?
Greg