I got it to work and i'll describe the sequence of steps for it below:
1. my test war worked on tomcat out of the box and it didn't in WAS 7.0....just FYI for everyone.
2. my jsf files were .xhtml, so maybe they need to be jsp / jsf extension to work, but i don't really think so since all files were mapped to the faces servlet in the web.xml, just throwing it out there.
3. i added the jsf 2.0 libs from mojarra/lib directly to WAS lib directory and restarted server. that didn't work....did WAS even load the jars into memory ?
4. i found and tried the class loader settings tweak, mentioned in the post above, that doesn't work. the error is "Error 500: javax.servlet.ServletException: SRVE0207E: Uncaught initialization exception created by servlet "....i think it can't find the faces servlet or at least version 2.0.
i set class loader priority to child first at both server and application level, it makes no difference.
5. i also messed around with the jsf settings, but neither work either.
AND NOW FOR THE SOLUTION:
i added the lib directory containing the jsf 2.0 jars under web-inf...just copy and paste, restart app. and viola, it works. note, i had child class loader set first.
why java doesn't have better class loader/conflict diagnostics programs is a mystery to me. NoClassDef for Life :)
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