Ok. after mucking around some more I discovered something. I was using HibernateDaoSupport as my base class on my DAOs, and then using getHibernateTemplate() to perform the load operation on my entity bean. When I changed to just using getSession() the problem went away. Not sure why exactly it's working like that, but maybe it will give some clue as to what I'm doing wrong. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3960232#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...