Upgrading ant was in the past no big deal. Just download the binary archive, extract it and adopt the ANT_HOME environment variable. ANT_HOME is set to the extracted folder and PATH contains a entry %ANT_HOME%\bin. So PATH does not need to change during an ant update. I’m recently updated from ANT 1.6.5 to 1.7.1. and was a bit suprised by the output of ant -version. It still shows 1.6.5 as version. I checked the environment variables but everything was fine. The problem is that ANT batch files look in different folders according to the manual. Prior to the ANT_HOME\lib folder will be the files in USER_HOME\.ant\lib be added to the classpath. This user home folder was on my machine still filled up with the jars from the 1.6.5 release. After deleting the contents show ant now the correct version. I understand the purpose of having additional libs available for own used tasks but the result behavior was annoying.