Thank you for your replies again. Picks up ? Ah I see the error is from the deployer trying to deploy something as a JBoss service which is actually contained inside my EAR which has a WAR and in my /WEB-INF/spring.beans.xml. I'm surprised it could find it, none of my containment files are exploded. Surely there is some other qualifying requirement too. For example the *.deployer file name as well as requiring a META-INF/spring-deployers-beans.xml with outer element ? I'm thinking that just having the name should never be enough but being the correct name and having a well formed data inside qualifies it for being picked up and special treatment. Anything not matching all of the requirements should elicit a warning and then be put back down (and ignored for further pickups until its timestamp changes again). The warning would be along the lines of foobar-bean.xml file does not contain outer element, ignoring file and returning. Also if there is a clearly DTD or XSD described in the *-beans.xml for which the deployer does not understand then no warning should be emitted for INFO log level. But possible to see the attempted pickup at DEBUG level. Now the next thing in the saga (not really spring related) : vfsfile:/data/opt/jboss-5.0.0.Beta4/server/default/deploy/Service.ear -> org.xml.sax.SAXException: cvc-pattern-valid: Value 'application/xhtml+xml' is not facet-valid with respect to pattern ' | [\p{L}\-\p{Nd}]+/[\p{L}\-\p{Nd}\.]+' for type 'null'. @ *unknown*[164,47][/core] | | I'm pretty sure this has been fixed in the Servlet web.xml DTD/XSD for a few years now, don't you just love validating parsers. Yes the plus character "+" is valid in a MIME type. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4133467#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...