thanks for your help! i discovered i had an old (draft2)version of the j2ee tutorial and after finding different errors in compilation (after getting draft5)i re-installed sdk1.3.1 and j2ee1.3 and everything worked. i had too many jars in my ext folder in sdk1.4.1 so nixing it (with extraneous older jars) seemed to help. ant says 'thou shall not have crimson or other xml jars in ext folders' in the manual(without any xtra jars in my java_home/lib or jre/lib/ext). thanks for your reply! : )