[Tomcat][IE5] Local Tomcat Unplugged

G'day all,
Next Tuesday I'm defending my dissertation for my software engineer degree and it's about a web application developped with JSP/Servlet running on Tomcat4.1.
This application runs superbly on our servers and I have installed a subset of it on my personal laptop (with Win98), running it with Tomcat4.1 locally since I want to do a demo during the presentation.
So far everything was cool : the appli works OK with Tomcat and mySQL on my Laptop. That's a bit slow but it runs.
However, yesterday I have tried to access my web application locally with IE5 WITHOUT connecting to my internet provider to do a dry run (during the presentation I will not be able to have a connection) and naively I thought that since my IE accesses a local version of Tomcat on http://127.0.0.1:8080 there should not be any problem.
But guess what ? there is. Whenever I try to access my local version of Tomcat unplugged, IE5 says "page cant be accessed without connection".
I'm sure there is a way around it (tuning IE5 ? Win98 ? Tomcat ?) so that I can access my local Tomcat from IE5 unplugged but I've investigated yesterday nite very late without any success.
Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.
[ October 15, 2003: Message edited by: cecil dijoux ]

Is it this?

http://www.coderanch.com/t/81585/Tomcat/tomcat-startup