Because the beans that push the things into the aspectmanager are not deployed until the BeanMetaDataDeployer picks them up in the REAL stage. Are you suggesting that as part of my POST_CLASSLOADER deployer rip out the aop beanmetadatafactories from the deployment, and deploy them myself there? That could work, they are easily identifiable, but I didn't want to mess around with the deployment too much. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4154404#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...