One thing I have realized digging into this issue more is that the EJB Deployer is immediately deploying my EJB jar. The MDB gets started immediately thereafter. If messages are on the Q the MDB is listening to, then it starts trying to consume them.... I think that maybe the Seam infrastructure, which AFAIK is bootstrapped by the war, is not available to listen to the MDB lifecycle, and thus, the Seam annotations are causing exeptions or are null on startup. Is there any suggestion for how to deal with this? Thanks, Brad Smith View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4012503#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...