I think I had some classpath problems or perhaps even a mixture of different release version jars. I deleted all jars from WEB-INF/lib and replaced the restlet and other dependent jars with those packaged in the 2.0.8 release and everything started behaving as expected. (Shaking my head).
------------------------------------------------------ http://restlet.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=4447&dsMessageId=2778874
