Basically Tomcat just can't reliably shut down a running webapp, because they are sloppy with their classloaders. You wind up with all kinds of static class references that aren't cleaned up properly, and the reloading of your webapp may or may not work. You can get weird ClassCastExceptions post-reloading because the old classloader's classes are still hanging around. At least that's been my experience.... Cheers, Rob View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3961477#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...