There seems to be an incompatibility between the svjour3 document class for Springer journals and the microtype package. Minimal example:

\documentclass{svjour3}
\usepackage{microtype}
\begin{document}
\end{document}

This results in 90 lines of the form

(\end occurred when \ifx on line 63 was incomplete)

being written to standard out.

Is there any workaround?