I found the problem mia culpa.
My friend sold stock for 200 and the basis was 423. Since I was doing just a sample return, I click override and enter -223 on line line 13 where schedule D goes. That drove ATX bananas and instead of using that tax table, it used alternative minimum tax.
Lesson I learned: If you need to override something, prepare the return and print it before the override and then compare. In this case, even if I lowered the W-2 from 206K to 79K, the program was giving me the wrong results. When using 79K, the error was very obvious.