short: Orion's classloading seems to be broken. It handles classes differently depending on whether they're loaded from WEB-INF/lib or WEB-INF/classes. I see related bugs in the Orion bugzilla database (http://bugzilla.orionserver.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=340) with no comments or solutions metioned.. long: I'm having some troubles with the Orion web application classloader. I'm currently using Orion 1.4.5 (I tried "java -jar autoupdate.jar" but it only asks me "Overwrite /config/database-schemas/sapdb.xml" and doesn't seem to do anything else). I'm running Linux, Sun JDK1.3_02. I'm trying to get the IdooXoap 1.1.1 toolkit running (http://www.idoox.com). It is delivered in an unpacked WAR directory. Classes seem to load from the WEB-INF/lib directory, but the application fails when those classes from WEB-INF/lib try to use Class.forName() to load classes that are in WEB-INF/classes. (Confused yet?) Here's what the default setup is, and what works on most other application servers: IdooXoap/WEB-INF/etc/config.xml IdooXoap/WEB-INF/lib/IdooXoap.jar IdooXoap/WEB-INF/lib/log4j.jar IdooXoap/WEB-INF/lib/xerces.jar IdooXoap/WEB-INF/classes/demos/...... The servlet that is being called is inside of IdooXoap.jar, and it tries to load the demos from the "classes" subdirectory. This fails - ClassNotFoundException. Here's how I've tried to fix it: 1) Create "IdooXoap/WEB-INF/lib/demos.jar" with the contents of "classes/demos". This fails again with ClassNotFound. 2) Unpack all of the libraries from "lib" into "classes" (and then remove everything from the "lib" directory). This works!! 3) Create a giant JAR of all classes in the "lib" directory (and then remove the "classes" directory). This works too!! court