You write: "I've already seen so many bugs in the Sun JDK 1.6 Xerces version that I recommend people never to use it for production work - this seems to be yet another reason to avoid it." But how do I switch to the Apache-release of Xerces? Is there a property I should set somewhere or a factory setting I should change? I've looked at the Xerces FAQ and elsewhere, but I couldn't find anything on the subject, except some references to changing the endorsed dir for Java, which I hope I won't have to do... Kind regards, Ernst de Haan