Why does my Netbeans debugger break into a commented line of code?

Question

I'm debugging a Java web application running on my local Tomcat server configured through Netbeans 7.4 (also tried 7.3.1). I'm hitting a breakpoint in my servlet and stepping through the code, but I hit a breakpoint that is commented out.

So, I'm pretty sure this isn't supposed to happen. What could be causing this and what can I do about it?

Things I've tried:

• clean, build, and redeploy (regenerate necessary artifacts such as war, etc.)
• close and reopen both the project and Netbeans
• manually delete project "target" build directory
• install new version of Netbeans
• install new Tomcat server
• throwing an exception at the beginning of my servlet to confirm that my code isn't compiling or being served (I don't see the exception being logged by Tomcat)

Answer 1

The cause of the problem ended up being related to old Java class files that were not being updated in the app's WEB-INF directory.

Does anyone know what could possibly be preventing these files from being updated during a clean/build/redeploy?