Sorry for the long response time, but I went on vacation a day after I posted the question.
I think the problem has to do with the keystore and the jave environment on the machine. No matter how many times I regenerate the keystore password or whatever I get the following problem at the SSL initialiazation:
java.io.IOException: Keystore was tampered with, or password was incorrect
at sun.security.provider.JavaKeyStore.engineLoad(Unknown Source)
at java.security.KeyStore.load(Unknown Source)
at org.jivesoftware.messenger.net.SSLConfig.(SSLConfig.java:69)
at org.jivesoftware.messenger.net.SSLSocketAcceptThread.(SSLSocketAcceptThre ad.java:93)
at org.jivesoftware.messenger.spi.ConnectionManagerImpl.createSocket(ConnectionMan agerImpl.java:73)
at org.jivesoftware.messenger.spi.ConnectionManagerImpl.start(ConnectionManagerImp l.java:148)
at org.jivesoftware.messenger.XMPPServer.startModules(XMPPServer.java:309)
at org.jivesoftware.messenger.XMPPServer.start(XMPPServer.java:198)
at org.jivesoftware.messenger.XMPPServer.(XMPPServer.java:116)