For some very mysterious reason this now suddenly works. One has to put the .jars into an apps WEB-INF/lib directory, which is the very first location I had tried. Only when that didn't work I started to search like mad, what magic incantation Geronimo requires me to mumble to locate those darn libraries.
Only when I gave up in despair and restarted from scratch this time everything magically worked as expected. The world would be a so much better place if computers would behave rational and understandably... Michael
