Compensation approval web woes

[Michael Pokraka]

Good <insert time of day> all,
 
Running MSS on a 4.7/620 system here, using the Web Approval Compensation
adjustment workflow. We have copied the standard compensation approval task
TS21300111 to our own.
 
The portal folks have updated the iview so everything is liked correctly (?) to
our new task. Here's where the fun begins: we have not been able to make this
work, we get an error "No employees found".
 
The task is based on EXTSRV.PROCESS, and as far as we have been able to
establish it calls the correct web service, but the container data is not
passed through. The prime suspect here is something in the task setup on the
portal side, however we have a seperate portal team who handle that end of
things and don't really have in-depth experience with UWL and SAP workflow in
general.
 
We've gone through note 646601 (MSS: Workflow Execution Handler no longer
supported) and a few related ones... so far no joy.
 
Just wondering if anyone knows of any simple things we may have missed out?
 
Cheers
Mike
 
PS: bonus points for answering another really weird one: We plugged the SAP
task into our WF to make sure it works.... it didn't, until we put it in a
subworkflow - WS21300038 calls WS21300039. We first put the task in our WF
directly and it didn't work, then we called WS21300039 from our flow and it did
work... very confused!