Surefire Plugin fails to do java endorsed

Suppose you are trying to endorse xerces and xalan in your surefire plugin and you see errors such as:
Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: internal error
at org.apache.xerces.impl.dv.xs.XSSimpleTypeDecl.applyFacets1(Unknown Source)
at org.apache.xerces.impl.dv.xs.SchemaDVFactoryImpl.createBuiltInTypes(Unknown Source)
at org.apache.xerces.impl.dv.xs.SchemaDVFactoryImpl.(UnknownSource)
... 45 more

This may mean that your setting of endorsed directory is not being propagated properly to the forked jvm by surefire. This was an issue in the 2.4.2 version of surefire.

This has been fixed in Surefire 2.4.3 (http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/SUREFIRE-491)