OK, if the @Remote case is supposed to work, EJBTHREE-854 should be closed as Rejected. This weekend I originally wrote the unit test the opposite way, to assert that the nested.increment() call worked; got ahead of myself and changed it this morning. Carlo, I agree with you about @Local; that kind of case is what prompted my initial confusion about spec behavior. If the nested bean has a dependent lifecycle, it's very difficult use normal pojo programming with a SFSB. If the nested bean doesn't have a dependent lifecycle, we need to come up with another approach to maintaining shared refs to the XPC. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4007979#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...