Yes, it might be related to how the surefire plugin forks the tests. You can pass classpath elements to the forked tests, but they aren't passed directly to the jvm. A basic jvm is created, and then a new classloader is created to load whatever things you need for the test. Maybe I'm wrong, but this sounds similar to a problem that Stale was having with some aop tests, when trying to use the javaagent option. But the problem was that there isn't a way to pass the necessary classpath to the jvm. I will take a look this week and see if I can fix this and get a patch submitted to the surefire plugin. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4130134#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...