Connection hangs "connecting, please wait..."

Hello - I have a computer running spark 1.1.4.0 that authenticates but then gets “connecting, please wait…” on the splash screen and it never loads. I’'ve tried using different accounts on the same computer but its only this one computer. It is running Windows XP SP2 and JRE 1.4.2. I am getting the below information in the logfile. Can you tell me how this can fix this? I have uninstalled and reinstalled the Spark client with no success. Wildfire server is 2.6.1.

Thanks.

Neil

om.thoughtworks.xstream.io.StreamException: : only whitespace content allowed before start tag and not \u0 (position: START_DOCUMENT seen \u0… @1:1)

at com.thoughtworks.xstream.io.xml.XppReader.pullNextEvent(XppReader.java:58)

at com.thoughtworks.xstream.io.xml.AbstractPullReader.readRealEvent(AbstractPullRe ader.java:118)

at com.thoughtworks.xstream.io.xml.AbstractPullReader.readEvent(AbstractPullReader .java:111)

at com.thoughtworks.xstream.io.xml.AbstractPullReader.move(AbstractPullReader.java :90)

at com.thoughtworks.xstream.io.xml.AbstractPullReader.moveDown(AbstractPullReader. java:75)

at com.thoughtworks.xstream.io.xml.XppReader.(XppReader.java:28)

at com.thoughtworks.xstream.io.xml.XppDriver.createReader(XppDriver.java:24)

at com.thoughtworks.xstream.XStream.fromXML(XStream.java:475)

at com.jivesoftware.sparkimpl.plugin.layout.LayoutSettingsManager.getLayoutSetting s(LayoutSettingsManager.java:69)

at com.jivesoftware.LoginDialog.startSpark(LoginDialog.java:714)

at com.jivesoftware.LoginDialog.access$700(LoginDialog.java:76)

at com.jivesoftware.LoginDialog$3.construct(LoginDialog.java:519)

at com.jivesoftware.spark.util.SwingWorker$2.run(SwingWorker.java:121)

at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

Caused by: org.xmlpull.v1.XmlPullParserException: only whitespace content allowed before start tag and not \u0 (position: START_DOCUMENT seen \u0… @1:1)

at org.xmlpull.mxp1.MXParser.parseProlog(MXParser.java:1518)

at org.xmlpull.mxp1.MXParser.nextImpl(MXParser.java:1394)

at org.xmlpull.mxp1.MXParser.next(MXParser.java:1092)

at com.thoughtworks.xstream.io.xml.XppReader.pullNextEvent(XppReader.java:43)

… 13 more