From Spring 3.2.x reference and introduction blog post:
Prior to Spring 3.1, the
context:property-placeholder
namespace element registered an instance ofPropertyPlaceholderConfigurer
. It will still do so if using thespring-context-3.0.xsd
definition of the namespace. That is, you can preserve registration ofPropertyPlaceholderConfigurer
through the namespace, even if using Spring 3.1; simply do not update yourxsi:schemaLocation
and continue using the 3.0 XSD.
So, my guess is that your XMLs are not using the proper XSD version.