slight problem with my previous post. It didn't quite work as well as I had hoped. It does prevent the exception from occuring, but then it stops picking up my entries from ejb-jar.xml and jboss.xml. If I change the <ejb-name> to match what I put in the annotation, i get the "Unable to create activation spec" error again. Basically, it seems I get this problem anytime I have xml entries in ejb-jar.xml or jboss.xml (or both), and if the <ejb-name> matches what's being deployed. This is problematic because I want to specify the topic name in jboss.xml, but I can't because i can't have a jboss.xml entry with the matching <ejb-name>. This seems like a pretty big problem. Is this a JBoss bug? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3962205#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...