In my quest to find a reliable way to authenticate, I've run against another problem (Orion 1.4.0, Windows 2000). This time I'm trying to use the default principals.xml. file. With the following line in my orion-application.xml, <principals path="principals.xml"/> when I run Orion to deploy my application, I get the following: Error instantiating application at file:/C:/k/wrk/bld/app/my-app.ear: Invalid principals config URL: principals.xml for my-app and the principals.xml file in the application-deployments directory is the default, blank one. HOWEVER, when I then copy my principals.xml into that directory, everything works fine, even though the orion-applications.xml file inside the directory still has the exact same tag I showed above. I've also tried "/principals.xml, /META-INF/principals.xml, ./principals.xml, /./principals.xml). So what did I do wrong now? P.S. I moved all this code from Linux, where everything was working fine using principals.xml. This error happens only on Windows.