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I downloaded and unzipped a core Tomcat 5.5.33 distribution and created a Tomcat 5.5 server that pointed at that distribution. When attempting to deploy or even just starting the server manually from the Services tab, the log indicates that the server start-up has completed, but the progress bar continues to spin until it finally times out and says that server start-up has failed. The IDE does correctly detect when the start-up of Tomcat 6.0 and 7.0 has completed.
IDE can't detect the started server if something prevents access to server ports. Looks like firewall issue.