Brian, Nested SFSBs have to share the same lifecycle as their parents. They also have to share the same Extended Persistence Contexts the reference! Another thought I had was to actually store the Nested Bean's instance inide of its proxy and propagate it to the Nested Bean's EJB container via the invocation object. If the invocation object had the actual bean instance already set, then the EJB container would not look in the cache. I don't remember why I didn't do this....Maybe I didn't think of it at first? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4007860#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...