Brent Douglas, just trying to fully understand what's going on here. The problem here is that the XMLInputFactory loaded in XmlParserHelper is loaded via the context class loader and since the member is static the class loader is leaked (never garbage collected).

If the application class loader would be used in this case we would be fine, right? However, there seems to be a problem with JAXP which makes this whole "redirecting" necessary. Is this correct?