Quick update... I got past my CORBA issues by switching to a back level JDK. We need to look at this in more detail. There are some Sun JDK bug reports around the "NPE when testing for ORB shutdown" issue. For me this means that I can compile 1.5.1 with Sun JDB6_07 but not with JDK6_16. I don't know yet at what level the problem starts or whether there is news of a fix.
Having said this I did subsequently run into several problems with not being able to download artifacts from maven repos so am holding pack until minotaur is back up again. Simon
