I just wanted to post this info so that other users don't make the same mistake I made. I was attempting to use the catalina_home/shared/classes for some shared class files and was getting ClassNotFoundException. When I copied those files to the catalina_home/common/classes directory everything worked fine. I finally found the issue, which I didn't see documented anywhere: I created my myweb.xml file by copying either the admin.xml or manager.xml. The problem is that those files contain privileged="true". Once I reset that to false (or removed the parm), I was able to load the classes in shared/classes.
