For me - the disconnect is the instantiate or create concept - since I am typically asking the container to provide a reference to a bean looked up via JNDI, I don't consider my application to be instantiating or creating session beans; I thought the container takes care of creation / instantiation automatically - thus, again, I don't consider my client code which uses an EJB to ever actually create the bean. I apparently incorrectly assumed that just asking Seam to @In one session bean into another would work - it did not occur to me that I would have to ask Seam to 'create' a bean (which it really isn't doing, right? - Seam itself is '[taking a cue] to look up the component (EJB) from JNDI ' when create=true AND there is no matching reference to the desired session bean available in any of the scopes). Rather than 'create' this concept to me is still more like 'lookup' and so anonymous wrote : | @In(create=true) | | Specifies that a component attribute is to be injected from a context variable at the beginning of each component invocation. If the context variable is null, an instance of the component is instantiated by Seam. | still doesn't express what's happening in terms that seem to me to be 'correct' - that's my issue. Thanks, Brad Smith View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3999504#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...