Bernd and other folks' examples in JBPM-1024 are about storing serialized objects in the variables, which is what I think is worth addressing. These objects cannot be deserialized if the class files are only present in the process archive. Now I understand what you meant by hibernate not knowing of the class, but hibernatable objects are not what JBPM-1024 is about. As Ronald points out, fixing the issue for hibernatable classes is harder. I don't know how to override hibernate's class loader except for overriding the context class loader, which will certainly open a can of worms. I committed a unit test (CustomSerializableVariableDbTest) which shows that JBPM-1024 affects 3.2.2 but not the current CVS head. Fady fixed it with a hack on VariableInstance, which goes to prove that a hack is faster than discussion ;-) View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4155215#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...