I think I had some classpath problems or perhaps even a mixture of different release version jars. I deleted all jars from WEB-INF/lib and replaced the restlet and other dependent jars with those packaged in the 2.0.8 release and everything started behaving as expected. (Shaking my head).
I'm no longer seeing the warning. ------------------------------------------------------ http://restlet.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=4447&dsMessageId=2778875
