If you just defined a new content type in Alfresco the cause may be empty characters at the beginning of the model context file, nevertheless it’s grammatically correct the parser can’t get through.

Eg. it may result in a stack trace similiar to:

org.springframework.beans.factory.parsing.BeanDefinitionParsingException: Configuration problem:
Failed to import bean definitions from URL location [classpath:alfresco/application-context.xml]
Offending resource: ServletContext resource [/WEB-INF/web-application-context.xml];
nested exception is org.springframework.beans.factory.parsing.BeanDefinitionParsingException:
 Configuration problem: Failed to import bean definitions from URL location
 [classpath*:alfresco/extension/*-context.xml]Offending resource: class path resource
[alfresco/application-context.xml]; nested exception is
org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.XmlBeanDefinitionStoreException:
Line 1 in XML document from file [D:\\xxxxxx-model-context.xml] is invalid;
nested exception is org.xml.sax.SAXParseException:
The processing instruction target matching "[xX][mM][lL]" is not allowed.
at org.springframework.beans.factory.parsing.FailFastProblemReporter.error(FailFastProblemReporter.java:68)
....

Also watch out for the empty characters at the end of file paths in configuration xmls cause problems, alfresco can’t find these files.