Hmmm, marking the messages field as transient seems to do the trick. I never did quite figure out why that was required, since the class is marked as Serializable. I was also surprised that Component.getInstance() calls in readObject() for facesMessages could fail because there was no conversation, even when my readObject() method was annotated as @Begin(join=true). Oh well, the simple method seems to work. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3965837#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...