OpenOffice 1.9.X and gcj

[Caolan McNamara <caolanm at redhat dot com>]

I've been looking into getting the java parts of the up and coming OOo
2.0 working under gcj, (http://people.redhat.com/caolanm/gcj/ has my
patches to date). 

There are some buildtime java utilities in OOo which create the user
help documentation, and pretty much everything else that uses java is
optional. The xmlhelp, XmlSearch and helpcontent2 modules of OOo are the
ones involved in generating the help documentation. I've gottem xmlhelp
and XmlSearch building with gcj -C, but have now run into a runtime snag
when XmlSearch gets used in helpcontent2. The existing program uses an
ancient 19991105 xt.jar from ftp://ftp.jclark.com/pub/xml/xt.zip and it
craps out with this error...

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
   at java.net.URL.URL(java.net.URL, java.lang.String,
java.net.URLStreamHandler) (/usr/lib/libgcj.so.5.0.0)
   at java.net.URL.URL(java.lang.String) (/usr/lib/libgcj.so.5.0.0)
   at com.jclark.xsl.dom.RootNode.RootNode(org.w3c.dom.Node,
com.jclark.xsl.dom.DOMExtensions, com.jclark.xsl.tr.LoadContext,
com.jclark.xsl.om.NameTable, java.lang.String, int) (Unknown Source)
   at
com.jclark.xsl.dom.XSLTransformEngine.createTransform(org.w3c.dom.Node) 

I've boiled the problem down as a standalone simple example as...
http://people.redhat.com/caolanm/gcj.problems/xt.problem.tar.gz

./runme.gcj.sh with gcj fails with the above error,
while ./runme.sunjava.sh with sun's java works fine.

Should I be able to get my little test program going, i.e. its a gcj
problem of some kind? or do I need to come at my problem from a
different angle because theres an obvious (bear with me, my gcj
experience is approx 3 days), flaw.

redhat FC3,
gcc-java-3.4.2-6.fc3
libgcj-3.4.2-6.fc3
xml-commons-apis-1.0.0.b2.6jpp_4fc
xerces-j2-2.6.2-2jpp_5fc

C.