Just my 2 cents for this. I find it scary that AS 5 will be so fragile to real life jars, but I do understand that in some cases it might be caused by actual user packaging errors. Why not why not have an an "ignoreBrokenArchives" option for all VFS that is disabled by default and then you fail with an exception saying..."oops - your xyz.jar is broken because of Blah. Set 'ignoreBrokenJar=true' in bla blah to ignore these" Then when users set that you just print warning for it instead of failing. This would allow for a hard fail, but at least users would be able to use the probably second most used database in the java world. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4188786#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...