My first Sun JVM Bug.

J2SE 1.4.2_06...

java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.apache.crimson.parser.Parser2.parseInternal(Parser2.java:691)
at org.apache.crimson.parser.Parser2.parse(Parser2.java:337)
at org.apache.crimson.parser.XMLReaderImpl.parse(XMLReaderImpl.java:448)
at org.apache.crimson.jaxp.DocumentBuilderImpl.parse(DocumentBuilderImpl.java:185)

Hmm.. turns out it's just bad programming on 'their part'. i.e. not disclosing where the Null Pointer Exception occured. I managed to track it down to the InputStream that is returned by the URLConnection object that is returned by the URL object when doing an openStream()....