Apologies, I was just abbreviating. And to be honest, I didn't actually trace it in a debugger. I'll do that later... unfortunately the webservice I was accessing has gone down so integration tests cannot be run just now.
What's annoying in this case is that the XPathFactoryFinder is package private which means it cannot be reused by code looking to specify *just* the classloader. The XPathFactory forces you to specify a stringified class name. Dan
