A problem presented itself recently that has been bugging me for a while. Log files from a web application running under Tomcat were always appearing in the system32 folder rather than the Tomcat logs folder. I was fairly sure this was because Tomcat was incorrectly configured but, as always, it's a case of finding the correct configuration settings. Since this only happened to Tomcats that were running as a Windows service I was also fairly sure it had something to do with the configuration of the service. 

When Tomcat is running as a service on Windows it can be monitored by starting the tomcat5w.exe application and passing in the name of the service to monitor. For example:

tomcat5w.exe //MS//TomcatService

This will present a window that details all the settings for the registered service and provides the capability to start and stop the service. The log problem was traced to an incorrect value (actually no value was being set) for the working path. Setting this to be the log directory fixed the problem. In reality it would be better to specify the working path to be the root of the Tomcat install but in the current set up this wouldn't work.