After fighting with eclipse a little I was able to get my eclipse 3.2 running with WST to deploy my web application to the root context with Tomcat. 

 The trick was that I had to manually edit the file:

<Workspace>\<project>\.setting\org.eclipse.wst.common.component

I had to remove the value in the context root line so it looks like:

<property name=”context-root” /> 

Then I updated the server.xml for my server and changed the autoDeploy setting to false, restarted eclipse and now I can access my site using just http://localhost:8080/. 

Hope this helps save someone else some time in the future!