I am sure I am overlooking something obvious
the following static query works fine
hqlQuery = \"select user from User as user where user.id = \'useri
Problem here is there is a conflict between the two ANT jar files(namely: antlr-2.7.6.jar from Hibernate Jar library & antlr-2.7.2 from struts-1.3) in your project. This appears to be a peculiar problem with Struts-1.3 & Hibernate applications.
Please remove antlr-2.7.2.jar from your project(/WEB-INF/lib folder)& it should work fine.. Let me know if it works..