Too Much of a Good Thing?

Thanks to a Facebook conversation with my friend and critque partner DeeAnna Galbraith, I'm going to ask today's question:  Can you have too much of a good thing? 

We've tossed ideas about conflict around here--external, internal, and various permutations of All Of The Above.  But DeeAnna is reading a book where pretty much everything that can happen does--yet from her description, not a lot of it relates to a conflict between the hero and heroine.  Which, I would argue, should be the crux of any good romance novel.  Oh, sure, people have physical disabilities.  And they lose their job.  Then someone in the family gets sick or dies.  And their car dies. . . You get the idea.  It's a whole huge bunch of bad luck, but to me, that doesn't necessarily equate to conflict.  It's something that could be fixed with an oil change and a good counseling session. 

To me, conflict that's big enough to sustain an entire book doesn't have to be anything with guns blazing or cars dying or even people dying.  It does, however, have to be a conflict that speaks to a fundamental difference between two characters who maybe WANT to like/love each other, but because of that fundamental difference, can't.  At least, not at the beginning of the book.  He thinks people should make their own end-of-life decisions; she thinks that's morally reprehensible.  There's your conflict, and not a bit of shouting or exploding cars is involved.

OR, there has to be something each of them wants that's mutually exclusive.  In VALENTINA, it was the hero desperately needing to make a business deal with the Bad Guy, whom Valentina wanted to kill.   In the end, neither of them got their original goal, but they got something bigger and better. 

So have you read books like this, where the author threw everything but the kitchen sink at the characters?  Did it work?  Pick it apart for us.