I don't really understand what you are trying to do? Guessing... INSTALL - MC wiring The add/removeContained looks like either the install or installCallback stuff. However, if a bean goes to the error state then it will have its uninstall or uninstallCallback invoked. There's no notion of holding onto a broken bean (except for error reporting - see above). CONTROLLER - a bit more control for yourself If you want to control the states manually then consider writing your own facade over the MC controller, e.g. take a look at what the ServiceController (in the jbossas system-jmx project) does to support the legacy JMX api. i.e. http://viewvc.jboss.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/jbossas/trunk/system-jmx/src/m... * stopping and starting mbeans from the mbean's own jmx operations mbeanserver.invoke() -> mbean.stop() -> servicecontroller.stop() -> MC * emulating the old SAR deployer or programmatic use of the ServiceController to manually change the mbean states * maintaining the legacy ServiceContext and listing them by state [url]http://viewvc.jboss.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/jbossas/trunk/system-jmx/s...] e.g. List listIncompletelyDeployed() {...} etc. For your usecase, it doesn't sound like it needs to be as complicated as the JMX stuff, but the "invokeStart() delegates to" sounds like a facade/wrapper to me? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4130761#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...