thanks Jaikiran.
I did one better, I started debugging the servlet with Eclipse. The good part is that is obvious that it does indeed execute the servlet. The bad part is that is obvious that JBoss uses same classloader for all the EARs, at least in this case (because when I don't have the MDB it doesn't), which makes the servlet (which uses some statics) to believe that the new starting "app" is already initialized.
In any case, I set the isolation of the EARs as true (ear-deployer-jboss-beans.xml, "isolated" property as true), and now it looks better, but I'm debugging a conflict between some Xerces libs in our app vs. the ones in JBoss. I'll need to play more with the isolation, the final goal is to have one classloader per EAR, which will be used by all the WAR and EJB-JARs inside.
Hmm... It looks like the following worked -
<jboss-app>
<loader-repository>
publish:archive=publish.ear
<loader-repository-config>
java2ParentDelegation=true
</loader-repository-config>
</loader-repository>
</jboss-app>
Anyway, thanks. Home my issue is fixed at this point,
ranjix