  This paper is a revised version of our recent publication Faber et al., Phys.
Rev. D62 (2000) 025019, hep-th/9907048. The main revision concerns the
expansion into group characters that we have used for the evaluation of path
integrals over gauge degrees of freedom. In the present paper we apply the
expansion recommended by Diakonov and Petrov in hep-lat/0008004. Our former
expansion was approximate and in the region of the particular values of
parameters violated the completeness condition by 1.4%. We show that by using
the expansion into characters recommended by Diakonov and Petrov in
hep-lat/0008004 our previous results are retained and the path integral over
gauge degrees of freedom for Wilson loops derived by Diakonov and Petrov (Phys.
Lett. B224 (1989) 131 and hep-lat/0008004) by using a special regularization is
erroneous and predicts zero value for the Wilson loop. We give comments on the
paper hep-lat/0008004.

High Energy Physics - Theory