Probably because I've changed the TransactionManager to do more of its setup in create() rather than start(). In my view the real problem is that CorbaORBServer does things in startService() that actually belong earlier in the lifecycle. Pretty much everything other than orb.run() infact. But since there are no real guidelines on what goes where in the lifecycle it's all a matter of opinion. Since it can't be guaranteed that the authors of two entities have the same opinion, there needs to be a flexible wiring of state dependencies. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4152375#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...