Oops, replied before finishing.
in catalina_home\bin\setclasspath.bat, we see that only the endorsed dir is being endorsed rem Set the default -Djava.endorsed.dirs argument set JAVA_ENDORSED_DIRS=%BASEDIR%\bin;%BASEDIR%\common\endorsed And a look at the doc on the subject http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/docs/guide/standards/ provides extra confusion, as it only talks about sax, dom, javvax.rmi.Corba and org.omg implementations. This leads me to suspect that the fact that tc4.1 doesnt load in java.* files in a webapp is not an artifact of endorsement (it cant be, given common\lib works), so much as an artifact of their classloader implementation (just like Ant1.5.x's <java> task doesnt get access to "sun.*" or many other classes in rt.jar, only the java.* and javax.* sets) So finger pointing at Sun may not be appropriate; we should change our docs accordingly. One thing that confuses me: add xerces to common\lib and everyone gets xerces, which is at odds with the endorsement concept. -steve
