Relative pathing for maven.home.local, JDK 1.3, plugin class not found

[dave hoag <da...@hotmail.com>]

If I have the following property in project.properties

maven.home.local=y:/maven-info/../maven-info

and use JDK 1.3 to run maven (such as maven clean)

I get the following error:
File...... file:/y:/maven-info/../maven-info /plugins/maven-artifact-
plugin-1.0/
Element... define:jellybean
Line...... 20
Column.... 67
Could not find class: org.apache.maven.artifact.deployer.DeployBean using
ClassLoader: null
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 3 seconds
Finished at: Tue Dec 23 16:25:33 CST 2003

I can solve this by dropping the relative redirection, but ultimately what I
want to have is:
maven.home.local=../maven-info
or
maven.home.local=${basedir}/../maven-info

but both of those fail in the same way. 
With JDK 1.4 this problem goes away.

Any ideas, suggestions? Other than "if it hurts, don't do that"?