I'm probably missing something as I don't understand why Ejb3Deployer would prevent the transaction manager problem. Ejb3Deployer is in deployers/ and everything in deployers/ should be deployed before deployment of deploy/ even starts. Looking at your log snippet, it looks like the deployment of the ejb3 jar is failing due to transaction manager not yet being deployed. Not sure, but from the preceding AuthenticationInterceptorFactory logging, I'm *guessing* its failing in creating a tx-related ejb interceptor. The exception stack trace should say. This is exactly the sort of thing this test should uncover. The transaction manager is deployed via a -jboss-beans.xml in deploy/, which will deploy after this sar unless a proper dependency has been programatically established by some deployer. So, don't hide the missing dependency by manually adding a dependency. :-) View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4178225#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...