Aaaah, that actually makes a lot of sense now - thanks guys :-) If I have understood correctly the ordering of the aspect deployers is what is important. I need to make the AOP deployer be one of the first aspect deployers in the chain. Is there a way to configure the order of the aspect deployers in the MainDeployer? I need the AOP metadata to be deployed before it attempts to load any of the classes, but it should happen after any classloaders have been created since that information is used for AOP scoped by classloader. The easiest way to achieve this would be to hardocde the aspect stuff into the conf/deployer-beans.xml, but I am not sure if this is the way to go? I've commited a first packaging of the AOP deployer (without annotation support). For now I have put the AOP jars in the lib/ directory, the aspect-deployer-beans.xml in the deployers/ directory and the base-aop.xml in the conf/ directory. I was going to keep the jboss-aop-jdk50.deployer, but doing it that way meant that the ejb3-interceptors-aop.xml file was not getting deployed since that got deployed before the AOP deployer itself (there is a TODO in MainDeployerImpl to process existing deployments) View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3977277#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...