You may need to be careful about which version of tar is running on the remote host, and which version is running locally. If they're different (e.g. remote host uses a native solaris version, localhost uses gnu version, or whatever), this might cause the sort of problem you observed.

Apart from that, does the local host get most of the content that you were hoping for? Can you isolate the particular file(s) that didn't get unpacked locally? (If, God forbid, one of the machines involved is using Microsoft text-mode semantics on the data transfer, that is bound to kill it prematurely.)