No, the prefrences manager is not part of my code which is what's making this so hard to figure out. It's part of the verdor "under the covers" code. I think I know what it would be trying to access based on what it's doing at that stage, but I've confirmed that file is in my war as well. I was hoping someone could point me to a deployment or startup issue.
Upon closer relefection, I am getting an error that I hadn't paid much attention to before because I thought it was on server startup rather than when the code got executed. The top part of the stack trace looks like this:
12:02:40,634 ERROR [STDERR] log4j:ERROR A "org.jboss.logging.appender.FileAppender" object is not assignable to a "org.apache.log4j.Appender" variable.
12:02:40,634 ERROR [STDERR] log4j:ERROR The class "org.apache.log4j.Appender" was loaded by
12:02:40,634 ERROR [STDERR] log4j:ERROR [BaseClassLoader@7d58ae{vfszip:/C:/Jboss/jboss-5.1.0.GA/server/default/deploy/dctmwebservices.war/}] whereas object of type
12:02:40,634 ERROR [STDERR] log4j:ERROR "org.jboss.logging.appender.FileAppender" was loaded by [org.jboss.bootstrap.NoAnnotationURLClassLoader@9ed927].
12:02:40,634 ERROR [STDERR] log4j:ERROR Could not instantiate appender named "FILE".
12:02:41,337 ERROR [SOAPFaultHelperJAXWS] SOAP request exception
java.lang.reflect.UndeclaredThrowableException
at org.jboss.ws.core.server.ServiceEndpointInvoker.invoke(ServiceEndpointInvoker.java:228)
at org.jboss.wsf.stack.jbws.RequestHandlerImpl.processRequest(RequestHandlerImpl.java:474)
at org.jboss.wsf.stack.jbws.RequestHandlerImpl.handleRequest(RequestHandlerImpl.java:295)
at org.jboss.wsf.stack.jbws.RequestHandlerImpl.doPost(RequestHandlerImpl.java:205)
at org.jboss.wsf.stack.jbws.RequestHandlerImpl.handleHttpRequest(RequestHandlerImpl.java:131)
at org.jboss.wsf.common.servlet.AbstractEndpointServlet.service(AbstractEndpointServlet.java:85)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:717)