Placing either the attached setenv.sh or setenv.bat(Windows) in Crowd's apache-tomcat/bin directory and restarting Crowd should resolve this issue. We will need to fix this in a future release.

Thanks,
Donna

I had the same problem on upgrading crowd-1.1.2 to crowd-1.2.1.

14:52:55,729 INFO com.atlassian.crowd.startup: Starting Crowd, Version: 1.2.1 (Build:#192 - Dec 10, 2007)
14:52:58,434 FATAL atlassian.crowd.util.build.BuildUtils: Cannot Parse date: Dec 10, 2007. Returning null for date
14:52:58,436 ERROR core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].[/crowd]: Exception sending context initialized event to listener instance of class com.atlassian.crowd.console.listener.UpgradeListener
java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.atlassian.license.LicenseUtils.isLicenseTooOldForBuild(LicenseUtils.java:161)
at com.atlassian.crowd.console.listener.UpgradeListener.contextInitialized(UpgradeListener.java:50)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.listenerStart(StandardContext.java:3763)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.start(StandardContext.java:4211)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChildInternal(ContainerBase.java:759)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChild(ContainerBase.java:739)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost.addChild(StandardHost.java:524)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployDescriptor(HostConfig.java:608)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployDescriptors(HostConfig.java:535)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployApps(HostConfig.java:470)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.start(HostConfig.java:1122)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.lifecycleEvent(HostConfig.java:310)
at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleSupport.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleSupport.java:119)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.start(ContainerBase.java:1021)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost.start(StandardHost.java:718)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.start(ContainerBase.java:1013)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngine.start(StandardEngine.java:442)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardService.start(StandardService.java:450)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardServer.start(StandardServer.java:709)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.start(Catalina.java:551)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Unknown Source)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.start(Bootstrap.java:294)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:432)

This is a problem with the Locale settings on the local machine. I had sv_SE as locale and experienced the same problem. (was quite tiresome to config Crowd all over again when developing and testing a custom connector).

The workaraound is to add "-Duser.language=en -Duser.country=US" to JAVA_OPTS in catalina.bat/-sh (in start_crowd.bat/-sh should work as well).