Following happened today.. Tomcat was ignoring one single WAR file. We was able to (re)deploy all other applications in webapps folder by removing and adding WAR files from and into the folder. But for one file was completely ignored. Solution.. A developer deployed the same WAR file earlier with context.xml file in META-INF folder. Tomcat stored this file into <tomcat home>/conf/Catalina/localhost named <context of application>.xml. If you now remove the file and restart Tomcat it will not ignore given WAR file anymore. Tomcat version we used was 5.5. There should be at least a warning message or something in log files to give a bit information why a file is getting ignored..