[jdom-interest] AbstractMethodError in DOMBuilder

[tom wible]

howdy, all, i'm trying to retrofit jdom into an existing xml tree editor, written waybackwhen (jdom makes things _so_ much easier, but i don't really want to rewrite all that code;-)

what i want to do is save a piece of an existing DOM tree into a new file, using the org.w3c.dom.Element selectedNode (which has been hi-lited in the gui)

	    newTmplt = templateFileChooser.getSelectedFile();
		dbgmsg("saveElementAs", "newTmplt="+newTmplt);
	    try
	    {
 		FileWriter out = new FileWriter(newTmplt);
		org.jdom.output.XMLOutputter serializer
			 = new org.jdom.output.XMLOutputter("   ",true);
  		org.jdom.input.DOMBuilder db = new org.jdom.input.DOMBuilder(); 
		org.jdom.Element     element = db.build(selectedNode); <-line 468
  		serializer.output(element, out);
  		out.flush();
  		out.close();
	    }
       	    catch(Exception e)
	    {
		dbgmsg("saveElementAs", "ERROR: "+e);
	    }

which results in the following:

	%%%%%%DBG:saveElementAs:        newTmplt=/jasper/data/COVER/templates/Threat/cvrinh2.xml
	java.lang.AbstractMethodError: com.sun.xml.tree.ElementNode.getNamespaceURI()Ljava/lang/String;
        	at org.jdom.input.DOMBuilder.buildTree(DOMBuilder.java:403)
        	at org.jdom.input.DOMBuilder.build(DOMBuilder.java:362)
        	at com.trw.mdd.tamd.WBC.EditorFrame.saveElementAs(EditorFrame.java:468)

and as my exception handler doesn't see the a.m.error, it must be swallowed in buildTree...shouldn't it be propagated?

so is this my problem or jdom's?
adthanxvance
tom