I had a similar issue with port 1098 on an Windows XP box. On AS 6, I could work around it by configuring the port to 10980 ./server/myapp/conf/bindingservice.beans/META-INF/bindings-jboss-beans.xml. I then carefully observed port usage right after boot in tcpview. I noticed that savroam.exe took 1098 for apparantly a few seconds and then "released it" -- but not really because JBoss could use it. When I disabled this version of anti-virus the problem went away. I believe this is a bug in 10.1.0.396 Symantec Anti-Vrus.