Is this your code:
com.documentum.fc.common.impl.preferences.PreferencesManager.readPersistentProperties(PreferencesManager.java:321)
That is not part of JBoss AS. What have you do so far to debug that code?
Based on the name of the class and method, I will assume that the code is attempting to read a properties file. Thus my first suspiscion is that the code could not find the properties file. Have you verified that the properties file appears where the code expects to find it? (I assume you deployed a WAR file, what are the full contents of that WAR? You can get that by running "jar -tf xxx.war")