I am using tomcat 4.1.27LE and when I paste the listener reference into my web.xml and try and start the application I get the following error

org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: Element "web-app" does not allow "listener" here.

Below is what I have pasted into my web.xml

<listener>
<listener-class>
com.tclltd.piston.SessionCounter
</listener-class>
</listener>

I would have thought that this should have been accepted?

Check your deployment descriptor. The location of the tag makes a difference. I think it goes somewhere above the servlet descriptor.

http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd