Arggghhhh! I figured it out, FINALLY. All day, I've been tracking this down. Somebody had 3 bogus control characters (UTF-8 likely) at the beginning of the manifest file inside of the jar where the class was. That was killing the deployer I guess. Some editor put them there when it was saved out. This has been there since day one, but nobody ever saw it because the shared class loading was picking the classes up out of another ear somewhere. That is all. Joe View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4124651#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...