I am thinking of uninstalling the rpm and reinstalling from the DVD to see what happens, will post my findings.
I reinstalled the rpm from the DVD 10.0 boxed version and started Tomcat through the run levels editor in YaST, now everything works fine here are my file permissions: ls -l tomcat5/base/ total 4 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 2006-05-19 08:46 conf -> /etc/tomcat5/base lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 2006-05-19 08:46 logs -> /var/log/tomcat5/base lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 28 2006-05-19 08:46 temp -> /var/cache/tomcat5/base/temp drwxr-xr-x 11 tomcat tomcat 4096 2006-05-19 12:41 webapps lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 28 2006-05-19 08:46 work -> /var/cache/tomcat5/base/work ls -l tomcat5/base/conf/ total 92 drwxr-xr-x 3 tomcat tomcat 4096 2005-09-12 22:20 Catalina -rw-r--r-- 1 tomcat tomcat 6954 2005-09-12 22:20 catalina.policy -rw-r--r-- 1 tomcat tomcat 2754 2005-09-12 22:20 catalina.properties -rw-r--r-- 1 tomcat tomcat 778 2005-09-12 22:20 jk2.properties -rw-r--r-- 1 tomcat tomcat 1128 2005-09-12 22:20 server-minimal.xml -rw-r--r-- 1 tomcat tomcat 20244 2006-05-19 09:07 server.xml -rw-r--r-- 1 tomcat tomcat 2254 2006-02-13 15:20 server.xml.new -rw-r--r-- 1 tomcat tomcat 310 2006-05-19 12:42 tomcat-users.xml -rw-r--r-- 1 tomcat tomcat 38929 2005-09-12 22:20 web.xml I am checking for updates though YOU but nothing comes up ... there is a memory in my head about doing an update but it is not appearing so I am kind of confused as to what let me to this. Thanks for your help, George