hauboon,
Not sure if this will help but ...
It appears that if no cache property is defined Hibernate uses ehcache. My problem was I had defined a cache and it kept looking for ehcache. The real problem was a space inside the double quotes (see below).
Code:
<!-- Wrong -->
<property name="hibernate.cache.provider_class ">net.sf.hibernate.cache.HashtableCacheProvider</property>
<!-- Right -->
<property name="hibernate.cache.provider_class">net.sf.hibernate.cache.HashtableCacheProvider</property>
The other option is to download ehcache at
http://ehcache.sourceforge.net/
Timothy Vogel