ANT_HOME is set incorrectly or ant could not be located [duplicate]

Answer 1

Actually ANT_HOME should NOT be set where ant.bat is located.

It should be set to the ant.bat parent directory.

E.g.

C:\apache-ant-1.8.1 <-- ANT_HOME
  |
  bin <-- this is where ant.bat lives.

As duffymo correctly pointed out the ANT_HOME/bin still must be on your PATH.