[GEEK] Is Log4J not doing what you expect, or not finding its properties?
Here's a handy bit of esoterica: To force Log4J to report on it's initialization sequence do this:
java -Dlog4j.debug=true
(And no, I usually don't use log4j, I use the Java 1.4 built in logging facility, but some of the libraries I like still use log4j.)