Tomcat 7 - Servlet 3.0: Invalid byte tag in constant pool

tomcat 7.0.16
Java 1.6.0_22
CentOS 5.6

I just switched the web.xml to servlet 3.0 (from a app running 2.4 previously) and now I'm seeing the following error (turned on fine logging for org.apache.tomcat.util):

mtyson  FINE: Scanning JAR [file:/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_22/jre/lib/ext/jcharset.jar] from classpath
mtyson  Jul 19, 2011 10:04:40 AM org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig deployDirectory
mtyson  SEVERE: Error deploying web application directory ROOT
mtyson  org.apache.tomcat.util.bcel.classfile.ClassFormatException: Invalid byte tag in constant pool: 60

UPDATE: Just Tried tomcat 7.0.19 - same results

Solution

It may not be your issue, but mine was the same as this one -- an old version of com.ibm.icu:icu4j. I solved the problem by changing my build configuration to exclude the older transitive dependencies and explicitly depending upon the latest version (4.8).