Perhaps the NPE is a bit of a red herring. What was odd to me was why destroy operations were happening during a deploy. Looking at the TomcatDeployer code, it's because of this: | String objectNameS = config.getCatalinaDomain() | + ":j2eeType=WebModule,name=//" + | ((hostName == null) ? "localhost" : hostName) | + ctxPath + ",J2EEApplication=none,J2EEServer=none"; | | ObjectName objectName = new ObjectName(objectNameS); | | if (server.isRegistered(objectName)) | { | log.debug("Already exists, destroying " + objectName); | server.invoke(objectName, "destroy", new Object[]{}, | new String[]{}); | } | So, something with that same object name is already registered in JMX; presumably the previous incarnation of the war. Were there any errors during the undeploy of the old version? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4152856#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...