You were correct to remove the StartupServletContextListener. MyFacesGenericPortlet handles all of the init stuff for portlets. In a portlet environment, we shouldn't use servlet constructs like a ServletContextListener. If you set things up in a ServletContextListener then it may or may not work depending on the Portal implementation. It sounds like that when the SerialFactory stuff was added to MyFaces it broke portlet support. However, that feature has been there for awhile and I suspect I would have heard something by now if portlets simply quit working. Maybe you have hit an edge case. The botton line is that this is almost certainly a MyFaces bug. Please open a task in MyFaces Jira: http://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/BrowseProject.jspa?id=10600 Stan Silvert View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3980232#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...