  We present new results concerning the existence of static, electrically
charged, perfect fluid spheres that have a regular interior and are arbitrarily
close to a maximally charged black-hole state. These configurations are
described by exact solutions of Einstein's field equations. A family of these
solutions had already be found (de Felice et al., 1995) but here we generalize
that result to cases with different charge distribution within the spheres and
show, in an appropriate parameter space, that the set of such physically
reasonable solutions has a non zero measure. We also perform a perturbation
analysis and identify the solutions which are stable against adiabatic radial
perturbations. We then suggest that the stable configurations can be considered
as classic models of charged particles. Finally our results are used to show
that a conjecture of Kristiansson et al. (1998) is incorrect.
