I added in as many try...catch blocks as I could and got no useful output, but it occurred to me that the Eclipse loader is adding in another level of code between my application and the kernel.
Can you please give more details about this "additional" code? How did you find out?
Do you mean that the application is running in an OSGi runtime? Can you please give a bit more details about the architecture and deployment of your application?
Is it a headless application or with an Eclipse UI?
I have had similar issues recently with the OpenJDK shipped in CentOS, and if your application is based on OSGi I may be able to help you analyze further.