If the MessageCenter.log4j.properties file in the project root is out of date or malformed in some way, the runtime will throw an exception. This can happen with the GUI runtime and in batch. We should perform input validation on the MessageCenter.log4j.properties file and use a default configuration if missing, and throw a warning instead.
The MessageCenter.log4j.properties can be out of data from a Repast 1.x model or user-edited incorrectly, so we should account for multiple paths that can corrupt the file.