Thanks for the link .. I'll add that to my list. In the meantime, I downloaded and searched through the 29M of mailing list archives ..

[tab@bert downloads]$ grep -i descriptor templates.mbox 
Entity and Session Beans, plus deployment descriptors so they could be
   <table name="contact" caption="contact" descriptor="name">
[tab@bert downloads]$ ls -lh templates.mbox 
-rw-rw-r--  1 tab tab 29M Jan  3 08:45 templates.mbox
[tab@bert downloads]$
[download]

.. and it appears that no one has yet posted a message asking about this particular problem.