Well, this is really not the place to discuss this. This is not a forum, but the issue tracker for Hibernate Validator. AFAICS there is no issue with Validator itself, but rather a deployment / application assembly error. You can try the Hibernate forum or Stackoverflow, but I think in its current form you won't get much help there either.

Note also, that Hibernate Validator 3.x and 4.x are completely different code based. Trying to mix these two will for sure create issues.