Just to let you know, you are not alone. I am not sure if there is some special attribute to the pages.xml xml, however, I ran into the exact same problem. Lessoned learned, don't use pages.xml with a Stateful bean that uses pagination, it won't work. I had to change the way I was doing things because I believe what you described above is intended by the pages.xml action. You define pages there so that the corresponding action gets executed EVERY time the page is loaded without exception. If this breaks your application, then you shouldn't use pages.xml, but look at the @Factory method possibly. Or the pull-style section of the seam documentation. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3969719#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...