adding these two system properties to the testrunner.bat file fixed the issue!
-Djavax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory=com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.DocumentBuilderFactoryImpl -Djavax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory=com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.SAXParserFactoryImpl
for example --> to this section of the file content
rem CVE-2021-44228
set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -Dlog4j2.formatMsgNoLookups=true -Djavax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory=com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.DocumentBuilderFactoryImpl -Djavax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory=com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.SAXParserFactoryImpl