Hi Lou and John,
it is the real message, I get it on my Ubuntu development machine on which I also develop and package. The runtime image resides in the same directory as the development image and the start batch files point to the same act directory location.
The only difference is the Locale setting.
A side effect that may be related is that on that machine, I get dates converted to american formats (12/31/2012) instead of German (31.12.2012) and the development image complains about an unsupported Locale. So this may or may not be a message related to Locales and the AbtDateConverter or some errors related to that one.
Interestingly, on a real web server that runs openSuSE, there is neither a problem with date conversion nor the missing nil in AbtMsgBase message show up... Since it runs on the production server (it is in fact a pre-beta machine), the issue is not pressing, but I'd like to understand it to avoid it on other systems or at least know what to look after...
So how would I find out what exactly is wrong? How can I find the places where AbtMsgBase is referenced and how could I possibly find out what the nil would normally be supposed to be?
Lou: the idea of internalizing Message catalogs (I guess that is the option you were talking about) sounds like a good idea. Image size is not important, this is a Seaside-based web application, so a few megs more or less don't really make a difference.
Joachim