  The one-particle density of states (1P-DOS) in a system with localized
electron states vanishes at the Fermi level due to the Coulomb interaction
between electrons. Derivation of the Coulomb gap uses stability criteria of the
ground state. The simplest criterion is based on the excitonic interaction of
an electron and a hole and leads to a quadratic 1P-DOS in the three-dimensional
(3D) case. In 3D, higher stability criteria, including two or more electrons,
were predicted to exponentially deplete the 1P-DOS at energies close enough to
the Fermi level. In this paper we show that there is a range of intermediate
energies where this depletion is strongly compensated by the excitonic
interaction between single-particle excitations, so that the crossover from
quadratic to exponential behavior of the 1P-DOS is retarded. This is one of the
reasons why such exponential depletion was never seen in computer simulations.
