I am having a lot of issues getting LDAP authentication to work with version 4.5. I believe it is in the section <bean id="ldapAuthenticationProvider" When I have this section un-commented I get this in the log file: 2012-09-11 15:16:52,317 ERROR ContextLoader,main:307 - Context initialization failed org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.XmlBeanDefinitionStoreException: Line 805 in XML document from ServletContext resource [/WEB-INF/applicationContext-security.xml] is invalid; nested exception i s org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: cvc-complex-type.2.3: Element 'beans' cannot have character [children], because the type's content type is element-only. If anyone can help it would really help.