FOUND IT! - I think! VERY frustrating. This is do with MyEclipse Exploded deployment (not what seam calls exploded deployment) Using MyEclipse -> Add and Remove Project Deployments and chosing exploded deployment (which maps out an exploded archive in JBoss deploy area) does NOT WORK. choosing .ear form of deployment (which creates and ear file and pops that into the JBoss deploy area) does work. Using JBoss Seam 2 B1 and JBoss 4.2.1GA What gave me the clue was that in desperation I cracked open a Seam 2 booking example (that did work when build with ant) and laid out all the same files into MyEclipse EAR, EJB and War projects and tried to run that... Cross post JBoss AS and MyEclipse & ICEfaces forums. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4065998#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...