And when you comment out the whole stanza, make sure that there are no embedded comments. In other words, this will not work: <!-- | <appender> | . | <!-- some embedded comment --> | . | . | </appender> | --> And the default FILE appender has embedded comments! Situations like this are where an editor that does XML code highlighting is very handy. View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4213400#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...