Hoping to bring this to the top of the queue for anyone else that runs into this: if you put configuration information into your Tomcat conf\server.xml file and said configuration contains a dollar sign ‘$’, according to bugzilla [1,2], the dollar sign is interpreted and thus doesn’t show up unless you double up on it. So if you have a environment entry like this:

<Environment name="ftp.password" type="java.lang.String" value="amsdk$k23"/>

you’ll need to change it to this:

<Environment name="ftp.password" type="java.lang.String" value="amsdk$$k23"/>

to make it work with Tomcat 5.0.x (same thing applies to JNDI entries in server.xml). According to this comment, this issue probably will not be fixed because Tomcat 5.0.x is in maintenance and not in active development. Supposedly this behavior will be fixed in version 5.5.7.

An observation: if you’re running a business selling software, make the bug list open the public. There’s nothing better than being able to find a solution without having to spend an hour on the phone with a technical support person who is doing nothing more than searching the private bug list.