Thanks swchan2. That gave me enough questioning in the right direction. I think that the delegate option is supposed to be set to false. That's how I get it to work. I you add the library to your project (which I do in using Netbeans>>Project>>Properties>>Add Library) and then go into your sun-web.xml file and add ' <class-loader delegate="false"/> ' which looks like...
<sun-web-app >
<class-loader delegate="false"/>
</sun-web-app>
it loads the actual apache codec Base64 class just like I want it to! Thank you and I hope this helps everyone else with this problem. I found in my research that you can not override certain parent packages like .javax and some others. It works for this though.
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