Nevermind...I figured it out. As it turns out, many new versions of Linux (and coincidentally, both SuSE 10.1 and Core 5) include with their default installation of ant a file /etc/ant.conf and a directory /etc/ant.d . I moved both of those to append their names with ".old" and re-initiated my session...not my Ant 1.6 installation is used. It tricks ya, you see? I'm pretty sure the conf file re-establishes my ANT_HOME to a directory I didn't want it to use. It only took me a week...but I figured it out. Thanks.