I got some more figured out yesterday. These parts in NX are very complicated. I had been trying to export full assemblies with a part count close to 1000 to STL. I tried a single part from an assembly and it worked like a champ straight to Cura.
I'm not a heavy NX user, so I'm not sure how, but it seems to me that if I could take an assembly and just export the outer most dimensions as a single part "skin" that it would go straight into cura without an issue.
In the meantime, I have a much more sloppy process of exporting to a .WRL file, importing that into Meshlab, exporting as STL then taking that STL file into NetFabb for a lot of repair work then into Cura works ok.
Does anyone know how to export a skin from an NX assembly?