sax parser unable to read spring xsd on deploy

[tbkahuna]

Running on JBOSS-4.0.5GA with xfire-2.1.6 soap stack.

Changing to spring 2.5 declarative transaction and have an application context doc (transaction.xml) with the following beans tag;

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:aop="http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop"
xmlns:tx="http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx"
xmlns:jee="http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee"
xsi:schemaLocation="
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schem...-beans-2.5.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx http://www.springframework.org/schem...ing-tx-2.5.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop http://www.springframework.org/schem...ng-aop-2.5.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee/spring-jee-2.5.xsd" ........

which gets the following error when the server deploys the application:

org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: schema_reference.4: Failed to read schema document 'http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd', because 1) could not find the document; 2) the document could not be read; 3) the root element of the document is not <xsd:schema>.

the URIs are reachable via browser.
server has no problem with earlier dtd based docs.

looked at proxy setting, it looks okay.
any ideas?