Thanks Marius.
There is one thing I've found w.r.t. classloaders - the thread context classloader doesn't seem to be able to resolve resources in embedded JARs within the bundle. I've filed an issue on this, but I'm not really sure if it's a defect or expected behavior: AS7-2165. My repro project has some workaround code for this issue, but with or without the workaround I'm still seeing the problem.
Thanks for suggesting "classpath*". In my real application this is indeed being used, so I've added it as another case in my repro project. But as you can probably guess I still can't resolve resources using it with either ClassPathXmlApplicationContext or VFSClassPathXmlApplicationContext.