tomcat and driver problem

i just moved from my debug environment to deployment mode. I have my Mysql driver in web-inf/lib folder. But tomcat is unable to load the driver.. I get this error

Well, I am using connection pool and I lookup for the jndi resource during server startup(i mean servlet startup) which works just fine, meaning I dont get a null datasource over there. But when I try logging into my app which makes the first database query, then I get the above exception.
Why is it that tomcat is not reading the driver jar file in my web-inf/lib....
All these days, i was working on an IDE where I mount all the jars in the filesystem and so never faced any problems.
Is there something i am missing here...
regards,
shankar

now this is a strange discovery, i moved the driver jar to commom/lib and it works fine. but then i discoverd that the server is not reading my web-inf/lib folder at all, becos i get some other noclassdeffound exceptions. now where do i place my dependencies??? i have all my dependecied in web-inf/lib folder as jar files. Is this not the correct place to place them??
I am for sure missing some setting....
Shankar.

web-inf MUST be in all upper case.
WEB-INF

Try that.