Sorry for the confusion here.
The stack trace for my first post of this thread relates to Hibernate JPA not being loaded. This problem is now temporarily solved my removing the toplink jars from the glassfish/lib completely.
The stack trace for my second post of this thread (the same stack trace I posted over at hibernate forum) relates to Persistence.createEMF failing during webapp redeployment. I should have started a new thread for this error. My apology.
[Message sent by forum member 'tmv' (tmv)]
http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=209670