Some possibilities. a) Somehow, the Unicode BOM (0xfffe or 0xfeff) is appearing at the start of the login-config.xml file and the xml parser is having problems with it. Perhaps removing that will fix the issue. b) The download is corrupted. Try downloading again, and verify the md5 or sha checksums. Make sure you get the download for JDK 5, not the one for JDK 6. c) Did you ftp the zip file to the remote server? Did you do that in binary mode? If not, the zip might have been corrupted during the transfer. This is not likely because of how far the startup got, but you never know... d) You might try using a more recent JDK, 1,5,0_11 is fairly old. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4182513#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...