Hello again, more info now. I now understand that the session is being flushed when I commit a transaction, and that is why updates are occuring to Question objects at that point. But why does hibernate think that these objects are dirty? They definately shouldn't be. I have implemented Audit logging using the idea suggested here: http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:Wg61eqMQfGcJ:www.hibernate.org/48.ht... Each entity that needs audit logging has the following xml in its mapping file: <property name="AuditInfo" type="BCS.QMIS.DataAccess.Hibernate.CustomTypes.AuditInfoType, QMISDataAccess"> | <column name="WhenAdded" /> | <column name="WhenUpdated" /> | <column name="AddedBy" /> | <column name="UpdatedBy" /> | </property> | If I remove this piece of xml from the Question.hbm.xml file then stage 3 of my first post does not happen, ie no unwanted updates occur and the version is not incremented. Any ideas? Many thanks in advance, Jordan. View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4227844#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...