Andrew - appreciate your response.

Just want to ensure I understand the effect of this change - if a NPE is thrown this code will catch it, log the error, but allow the portal startup to continue.  The other bean creation failures identified in the uPortal log when this problem happens will not occur.  The only drawback to this approach is that one or more portal data exporters will not be available but all other portal systems will be correctly configured. Is that correct?

Thanks again for the help.  This issue has been bugging us for several weeks.