Looks like the issue here is JBossCacheDistributedTreeManager should have the HAPartitionCacheHandler injected instead of its cache property. It can then call acquireCache() during the start phase of the HANamingService. The current code works if HAPartition goes through start() before JBossCacheDistributedTreeManager is constructed/has properties injected, which is of course too fragile. I'm assuming your move of stuff out of conf/jboss-service.xml has altered the order in which things occur by allowing a bunch of beans to go through construction/property injection while waiting to go through create/start until the naming service dependency is subsequently satisfied. This is all a hack to speed startup by allowing HAPartition to start a cache and HAPartition's own core channel in parallel. I've been sorely tempted to make the whole issue go away by reverting DistributedState and HA-JNDI to not use JBoss Cache. Using JBC for these adds a lot of conceptual ugliness for what seems like little benefit. That's a fairly substantial effort though, so I'll just get the dependencies correct this morning. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4182117#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...