Even with a lot of tweaking (which shouldn't be necessary) you can't get ODE 100% stable. It's buggy. It's really great if your customer complains about objects that rocket around for no reason and you can only say that you can't do anything about it.

It simply is the worst physics engine out there. The O(n) solver is very unstable and the O(n^3) solver is very slow (and still sometimes unstable). There are only two somewhat reliable collision shapes (box and sphere - how would you do those barrels? :)) and many other features are missing.