Bart,
in CVS I see Don has commited changes like you describe in this thread June 15.; added the -persist flag to the xml_parse call in acs-lang and dropped the use of xml_doc_get_first_node_by_name:
http://xarg.net/tools/cvs/change-set-details?key=B2BCE9FBF7DA6F3AA28EC932C7F7B9A5E38E7D19Since then I've also installed OpenACS from CVS HEAD with error free success.
