current transaction is aborted, commands ignored until end of transaction...

Hello,

I'm having a bit of trouble with the error message from the subject. Is
there a way to simply go on with my commands if I hit this error?

One example would be when I drop a table (and it doesn't exist) I still
want to run the following CREATE TABLE. But due to the error even the
following valid command will fail.
This problem is not limited to DDL. When I try to write the result sets for
several queries to disk it's the same problem, if e.g. the first select
reports an error (e.g. due to a typo in the column list) all subsequent
ones will no run as well.

I know that I can "fix" this state by issuing a rollback (or commit). The
problem is, that this stuff is part of a bigger program, and I cannot
determine whether I'm allowed to do a rollback or commit at that point.

Is this a problem with the JDBC interface that I'm using, or is this a
general Postgres problem?

Is there a setting where I can control this behaviour?

I'm using 8.0.2 on Windows 2000 (and XP)

Thanks for your help
Thomas