I'm not sure if we will see this NPE again but found the location interesting. I wanted to report the failure in case it happens again in the future or anyone else is interested in playing detective for mysteries like this. ;) The exception call stack is here http://pastie.org/2104060 It looks to me like AbstractServiceRegistryImpl.serviceBindingMap is null for some reason. It makes me wonder if AbstractServiceRegistryImpl.destroy() was called prematurely for some reason (for some unexpected reason). I wanted to mention the NPE here in case it happens again, so we can see what is in common with this one. Next time, we will have to capture the AS server.log output which might have additional clues but didn't this time. Scott