David,
Thanks for your quick reply.
I added the dependency in org.jboss.as.standalone module import list as you suggested, however, I am still receiving a MalformedURLException unknown protocol: smb within my application.
The good news is that I now see the .index files being created without requiring a dependency to jcifs in the .ear Manifest.
Before this change the .index files were only created if the .ear had a dependency on jcifs, and I can see that the list of modules in the ModularURLStreamHandlerFactory is final.
Hence I assumed loading the jcifs module as a dependency on the .ear was too late. I thought that defining -Djboss.protocol.handler.modules=jcifs would have resolved that, but I guess not.
I tried adding export="true" on the jcifs dependency, but still the same Exception.
I also tried to place the jcifs dependency before the org.jboss.as.server dependency to see if that would help, since it appears that is where the Main and Bootstrap classes reside, but still no luck.
Is the order of the dependencies important?
Am I missing something?