Found the solution! My company requires the use of a proxy to access the Internet, and since I didn't have Tomcat set up to use it jBPM was hanging on locating the DTD for my pageflow.jpdl.xml file. Setting the proxy fixed it, and now jBPM initializes in just a couple seconds :) FYI: I discovered this because when I upgraded my JSF implementation from 1.2_02 to 1.2_05-RC1 it also hung for a while, but then most fortunately threw an exception (instead of hiding it like jBPM) View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4077496#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...