We encountered a problem working with tomcat (Ver 4.03 and 4.1.3): 

When working with a WAR (not an unpacked war) and  using include and 
jsp:include with relative references, the following error occurs:

java.io.FileNotFoundException: /org1/requestor/../general/navigationBar.jsp 

(I can e-mail a war that demonstrates this).

When working with an open war, is is possible to open 
warTests/org1/requestor/requestor.jsp which has a jsp:include 
to ../general/navigationBar.jsp.

But the error occurs only when we are working directly from the WAR. 

In order to re-produce this,  a context must be added, unless tomcat 
automatically unpacks the war with it's auto-deploy mechanism.

Here is the required context entry to server.xml 

        <Context path="/warTests" docBase="warTests.war" debug="0"/> 

The only documentation we have found on this problem is this: 
<http://community.borland.com/article/0,1410,27963,00.html> 

We have found in bugzilla some related bugs which mention the problem with an 
open war but they were all fixed. But there was no sign for the war problem:

<http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3098> 

<http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=8092> 

<http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=2193>