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I dropped a jar file into enterprise2/jakarta-tomact-5.5.9/shared/lib/ and the classes are not available to webapps at runtime. Putting the same jar file into common/lib does work (though that makes the classes available to tomcat itself as well, which is not recommended).
Works for me. You will probably just need to restart the IDE, since there is no action which would trigger rescanning of the $CATALINA_HOME/shared/lib folder.
Funny. It really doesn't work for me. Same setup in a standalone tomcat does, though. Weird.
What build did you try? Did you try NetBeans 5.5 Beta?