I wanted to test the examples using a different Hypersonic database (not the one shipped with jboss). Turns out I needed to resort to Hypersonic version 1.6. It must be an issue with drivers because I think Jboss 3.04 uses Hypersonic 1.6. Anyhow I started up a separate version of Hypersonic 1.6 and the examples for CMP (ganster ones) were working.
by the way, for those that don't know standardjaws.xml is associated with cmp 1.1 and standardjbosscmp-jdbc.xml is associated with cmp 2.0. I took standardjaws.xml out of the conf directory and everything worked fine.