MinionPro conflicts with fnsymbol

Question

For various reasons, I need to include two footnotes at the beginning of my document referenced with symbols rather than numbers; it does not matter what symbols I use, so long as they are not numbers. I know can do this with:

\renewcommand{\thefootnote}{\fnsymbol{footnote}}

some text.\footnote{some footnote text}. some more text.\footnote{some more footnote text}

\renewcommand{\thefootnote}{\fnsymbol{footnote}}

This works when I use mathpazo or mathptmx as my font, but not with MinionPro. The MinionPro manual specifically states that the font is incompatible with amssymb and amsfonts, but even when I comment these out, I get ! TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [parameter stack size=10000] and I get a 1-page output file with just the title. As soon as I revert to a font other than MinionPro, the problem disappears and the whole document compiles without a hitch. Similarly, if I keep MinionPro as the font but declare only one non-numeric footnote, everything goes smoothly.

Answer 1

Normally, this works: I've defined another series of ‘symbolic’ footnotes, to be used with the \footnoteS command, while standard footnotes are obtained with the \footnote command. This requires only the bigfoot or manyfoot package, and it works with my version of MinionPro.

\documentclass [a4paper,12pt]{book}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{MinionPro}

\usepackage{bigfoot}
\DeclareNewFootnote{S}[]
\renewcommand{\thefootnoteS}{\fnsymbol{footnoteS}}

\begin{document}

\vspace*{0.8\textheight}
Here\footnote{A first,  traditional footnote. } is a symbolic footnote\footnoteS{Another, special footnote. }, and another \footnoteS{Yes,  another! }.

\end{document}