Spring/Tomcat/Hibernate/Maven "Cannot find class" problem

I've got lots of moving parts and I'm not sure what area is giving me problems. I think it is a Spring/Tomcat class loader issue so I'll start here.

I have a web app that access JPA objects via Hibernate. The project is built using Maven and uses Spring for configuration. My JPA objects are built in a different maven module and and it included as a dependency in my main project. It is included correctly in the built war file in WEB-INF/lib. When deploying the application to tcServer it isn't able to find the JPA objects. I'm getting an error:

Code:

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Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Cannot find class [com.mytest.Asset]
        at org.springframework.util.ClassUtils.resolveClassName(ClassUtils.java:293)
        at org.springframework.beans.propertyeditors.ClassEditor.setAsText(ClassEditor.java:63)
        at org.springframework.beans.TypeConverterDelegate.doConvertTextValue(TypeConverterDelegate.java:416)
        at org.springframework.beans.TypeConverterDelegate.doConvertValue(TypeConverterDelegate.java:388)
        at org.springframework.beans.TypeConverterDelegate.convertIfNecessary(TypeConverterDelegate.java:157)
        at org.springframework.beans.TypeConverterDelegate.convertIfNecessary(TypeConverterDelegate.java:111)
        at org.springframework.beans.TypeConverterDelegate.convertToTypedArray(TypeConverterDelegate.java:427)
        at org.springframework.beans.TypeConverterDelegate.convertIfNecessary(TypeConverterDelegate.java:169)
        at org.springframework.beans.BeanWrapperImpl.convertIfNecessary(BeanWrapperImpl.java:447)

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We are using Tomcat 6.0 bundled with SpringSource. The Tomcat configuration is pretty standard with the exception of specifying an alternate class loader:

Code:

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<Context docBase="C:\Program Files\springsource\vfabric-tc-server-developer-2.6.1.RELEASE\BaseInstance_MSL\wtpwebapps\msl-and-mars-services"
        path="/msl-and-mars-services" reloadable="true" source="org.eclipse.jst.jee.server:msl-and-mars-services">
  <Loader
        loaderClass="org.springframework.instrument.classloading.tomcat.TomcatInstrumentableClassLoader"/>
</Context>

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I originally thought maybe I needed to include the <jar-file> in the persistence.xml file, so I included it:

Code:

---

<persistence xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence"
        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_2_0.xsd"
        version="2.0">

        <persistence-unit name="mcbsDS">
                <provider>org.hibernate.ejb.HibernatePersistence</provider>
                <jar-file>file://../mcbs-jpa-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar</jar-file>
...

---

but I'm still getting the error.

Lots of other configuration details but I'm not sure what is relevant. Any advice?

Thanks