Quick update: above point that I'd reached - it was still trying to connect to wrong db. Just up in the log I had in the middle of the actual connection details... ...jdbc:hsqldb:mem:.;sql.enforce_strict_size=true... So it looked like this also needed changing in hibernate.cfg.xml. Duly done, I was then on to the next failure... [junit] 14:26:26,890 [com.mchange.v2.async.ThreadPoolAsynchronousRunner$PoolThread-#1] DEBUG BasicResourcePool$AcquireTask : An exception occurred while acquiring a resource. [junit] java.sql.SQLException: Network error IOException: Connection refused: connect This one turned out to be a problem with my SQLserver (desktop edition) - eventually by running the server network utility (not the client version) it was clear that neither TCP nor named pipes were enabled. Once enabled, the connection was established. On to the next... And the next (current) was/is that the test doesn't run unless it has a database to delete. When it does, it successfully establishes a connection, alters the tables to drop the constraints, then drops the tables. But then it stops afterwards trying to remove the table constraints ready to delete the table - it appears that the db wasn't successfully recreated due to a failure just before... [junit] java.lang.Exception: DEBUG STACK TRACE for PoolBackedDataSource.close(). [junit] at com.mchange.v2.c3p0.impl.AbstractPoolBackedDataSource.close(AbstractPoolBackedDataSource.java:417) [junit] at com.mchange.v2.c3p0.impl.AbstractPoolBackedDataSource.close(AbstractPoolBackedDataSource.java:429) [junit] ... This may well be the processing that was trying to create the db... Once again, any ideas? Brgds... \rr View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4007796#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...