FYI: This issue is related to JRA-968. That issue is marked as non-reproducible but the problem still exists. I have attached the necessary log files that show the errors.

In conjunction with following the instructions for deploying to Tomcat 4.1.x as described by Atlassian do the following.

Steps to reproduce:
Edit entityengine.xml (see attached file).
Build 2.5.3 war file.
Stop tomcat
Update server.xml (see attached file)
Add/remove required jars.
Extract war file contents to directory (i.e., jira253) specified
as the docBase in the server.xml file.
Start Tomcat.

App will come up, you can see data, login, etc. but errors show in catalina.out file consistently. Errors also show in context log file for init() method with root cause being a NullPointerException (see file).

I would be happy to allow a member of the Atlassian team ssh access to my server if they cannot reproduce the problem there.

Thanks