I did a little further debugging and found out, that it has to do with the optional=false If I remove that attribute, it works without any problems. Anyways: is this the way it should work? I think this behaviour is still a little bit strange and I´m still not satisfied with this non-handled exception. Is there anyone, who´s familiar with the ejb3-workflow in this case? Thanks Thomas View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4012510#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...