Problem with HttpURLConnection and struts

[MA...@de.ibm.com]

I'm getting a strange error:
I wrote a normal servlet which establishes a HttpURLConnection  to do a
POST request to a remote server. Everything works fine.
I have now moved my application to use struts and implemented the same code
inside the perform() method. Now, I get an "java.net.SocketException:
socket closed (code=0)" while retrieving the InputStream from the
URLConnection after having restarted tomcat. I can try it as often as I
want, the Exception stays the same. I found out, that after executing my
old servlet one time (which still works), my struts application will work
also. This is absolute reproducable

Any ideas ?

Thanx, Maik.