Thanks Steve,
Your comment about the caching proxy server makes a lot of sense; it
seems very likely that this is the cause. I'm not sure how often our
company proxy servers get flushed, or how quickly ant 1.7.1 will drop
out the cache, but I'll try again in a few days and see what happens.
Thank
Tried downloading apache-ant-1.7.1-bin.zip and
apache-ant-1.7.1-bin.tar.gz today, and extraction using jar xf and
winzip failed. Checked the MD5, SHA1 and PGP signatures and they all
failed. Tried a couple of mrirors
(http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.apache.org and
http://mirrors.dedipower.co