Running Ant 1.8.1 on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server results in sporadically not recognizing <property environment="sysenv."/>; as this (unedited sequence illustrates):

anthill@zlinuxs1:~/JDE015/EJBServer> ant -f test.xml
Buildfile: /home/anthill/JDE015/EJBServer/test.xml

test:
     [echo] ${sysenv.SERVER_DIR}

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 23 seconds
anthill@zlinuxs1:~/JDE015/EJBServer> ant -f test.xml
Buildfile: /home/anthill/JDE015/EJBServer/test.xml

test:
     [echo] /home/anthill/JDE015/EJBServer

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 20 seconds
anthill@zlinuxs1:~/JDE015/EJBServer> cat test.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project name="CuramServerBuild" default="test">

  <property environment="sysenv."/>

  <target name="test">
   <echo>${sysenv.SERVER_DIR}</echo>
  </target>

</project>
anthill@zlinuxs1:~/JDE015/EJBServer> ant -version
Apache Ant version 1.8.1 compiled on April 30 2010
anthill@zlinuxs1:~/JDE015/EJBServer> echo $SERVER_DIR
/home/anthill/JDE015/EJBServer

My searches indicate issues around <property environment> failing due to memory issues, but in searching -v output of my failures I have not seen any errors. But, could this be resource-related, failing silently?

This is the environment (SLES 10 SP2), no other platforms at our site have reported this: uname -a
Linux zlinuxs1 2.6.16.60-0.21-default #1 SMP Tue May 6 12:41:02 UTC 2008 s390x s390x s390x GNU/Linux

Thanks,
William