I have installed Tomcat 5.0.28 under Windows XP a while ago and I have just discovered that all of the Administration applications (Status, Tomcat Administration, and Tomcat Manager) fail with 404 errors.

The install is fairly straight forward. I have set an environment variable for CATALINA_HOME (c:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 5.0). A Struts application I wrote works fine under Tomcat.

These Administration applications reside in a different folder (%CATALINA_HOME%/server/webapps instead of %CATALINA_HOME%/webapps). The respective admin.xml and manager.xml contain the proper docBase (e.g., docBase="${catalina.home}/server/webapps/manager")

Is there some configuration setting I'm missing? What causes Tomcat to look for these applications in the server/webapps directory in the first place?

did you get the answer for this? i'm also into the similar issue

Do you use virtual host?
If yes , you have to add in server.xml for every host some lines like above:
</Host>
<Host name="www.virtualhost.com">
        <Context path="/manager" debug="0" privileged="true"
                 docBase="/usr/local/path/to/server/webapps/manager">
        </Context>
</Host>

DO not forget to add a user with manager role to tomcat-users.xml

I hope it helps

-- DELETED POST BY AUTHOR --

decided to start a new thread so I trashed this post. Sorry for cross-posting!