There is no way to do that in standard XSLT.
A system is _allowed_ not to error on a missing file, and if it does not
error, then it must return an empty node set, and your test will work.
If however it does error (and your system seems to), you have no way to
recover.
Since you are (presumably) using xalan inside cocoon you can use
xalan's extension functions to
eg this (which uses saxon's interface to java, but xalan has something
similar I think)
<xsl:template name="file-exists-p" xmlns:file="java.io.File">
<xsl:param name="filename" select="'x'"/>
<xsl:value-of select="file:exists(file:new($filename))"/>
</xsl:template>
An alternative is to customise your URI resolver classes in Java so that
they don't error on a missing file, but instead return some standard XML
file that you can test for.
David
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