SOLUTION: OK, turns out the problem was that for whatever reason the first time Maven downloaded the archives some of the jar files came in corrupted. The Apache Commons Collections was one of these and generally the first one encountered when trying to run any Maven build. The error messages from the command line were not terribly enlightening and not until attempting to run the build from Eclipse did I see that about five of the jar files were corrupted. I deleted the corrupted files and re-ran Maven, this time finding one corrupted file so I deleted it again and the third time was the charm. Thanks to those who offered assistance, I am now officially started with Maven.
---------------- == Hello, and thanks in advance for any help. == I am completely new to Maven and trying (without success) to get the most basic of Maven functionality == to work. == Have tried multiple versions of Maven and Java all with the same results (see below). == It seems the Apache Commons Collections jar is missing, and for some reason not being downloaded. == Any ideas why or what I can do about it?
