java.security.cert.CertificateParsingException: signed overrun

A note to those who run into this nasty little problem while starting an amazon EC2 instance:

org.codehaus.xfire.fault.XFireFault: General security error; nested exception is: 
 java.security.cert.CertificateParsingException: signed overrun, bytes = 919
 at org.codehaus.xfire.fault.XFireFault.createFault(XFireFault.java:89)
 at org.codehaus.xfire.client.Invocation.invoke(Invocation.java:83)
 at org.codehaus.xfire.client.Invocation.invoke(Invocation.java:114)
 at org.codehaus.xfire.client.Client.invoke
 at org.codehaus.xfire.client.XFireProxy.handleRequest
 at org.codehaus.xfire.client.XFireProxy.invoke
 at com.amazon.aes.webservices.client.Jec2.runInstances
 at com.amazon.aes.webservices.client.cmd.RunInstances.invokeOnline
 at com.amazon.aes.webservices.client.cmd.BaseCmd.invoke
 at com.amazon.aes.webservices.client.cmd.RunInstances.main

The trick is NOT to use command line parameters, but to use export variables! An example would be:

 % export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=/home/user/keys/pk-SOMERANDOMNUMBERSANDCHARACTERS.pem
 % export EC2_CERT=/home/user/keys/cert-SOMERANDOMNUMBERSANDCHARACTERS.pem
 % ec2-run-instances ami-179e7a7e

and the error is gone..