It turns out the clustering beans have a screwy relationship that is not working in general with the mc dependency injection: http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4181999 The problem is that the HAPartitionCacheHandler relies on other beans to setup its properties, but does not express this relationship as a dependency because the other beans inject the HAPartitionCacheHandler so that they can call methods on it. In reality either these need to be rewritten, or a bean factory written that can wire these together correctly. The configuration that exists is: JBossCacheDistributedTreeManager injects HAPartitionCacheHandler.cache and depends on HAPartion and HAPartitionCacheHandler implicitly depends on HAPartition to initialize its cache. My question is can one delay injection of the HAPartitionCacheHandler.cache until the HAPartition bean is started? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4182001#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...