In this article, we discuss reaction-diffusion problems which produce ordinary boundary layers and elliptic corner layers. Using the classical polynomial Q1-finite elements spaces enriched with the so-called boundary layer elements which absorb the singularities due to the boundary and corner layers we are able to attain high numerical accuracies. We essentially obtain ε-uniform approximation errors in a weighted energy norm with significant simplifications in the numerical implementations; here we do not use mesh refinements.