Ha! I found my workaround. I assigned an actual context path to the portal so it's no longer on the server root. Then I just added a tiny webapp whose only job is to redirect request to the new url. With the context path in place I no longer get '//' and the URLs resolve fine.
Woww, what an upphill battle it has been with JSF and portlets(or rather portal). Hopefully they will standardize more things in the next iterations of the portlet and JSF specs. -Henrik
