Found out from list that the betterform extension to eXist is making a call to a SAXON method that doesn't exist in my saxon parser (though I'm using the one suggested, so I don't know why that method isn't there). Anyway, by removing all the configuration specifications for betterform from the WEB-INF/web.xml file, I can get the vanilla install of eXist 2.1 to launch in Tomcat. That's progress. I then trashed the betterform folder and that introduced no problems. Martin suggested that just getting rid of the betterform folder might have been enough, but I haven't tried that. Next I've got to try to create an instance of the francotoile as an eXist 2.1 app, remove any betterform config stuff and folder, put that into the tomcat environment and hopefully it will run.