By adding the privileged="true" attribute to the Context element of some conf\Catalina\localhost\myApp.xml as in: <Context path="/myApp" docBase="C:/myApp/" cookies="false" override="true" privileged="true"> Jar files within shared\lib are no longer loaded for the myApp application, but jars from common\lib are. We are using Tomcat 5.5.17 with JRE 5.5_06 running on Windows and AIX servers. The problem is consistently reproducible. For us the temporary workaround has been to move our shared jars from shared\lib to common\lib.
Sorry, the docs should have made the change in parent class loader as a result of using this option clear. I have updated the docs for trunk and proposed the change for inclusion in 6.0.x and 5.5.x.
Fixed in 6.0.x.
Fixed in 5.5.x and will be included in 5.5.26 onwards.
*** Bug 39589 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***